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Tennessine (2023)
Complex film about space impacting female choice & relationships
I saw this film in 2024 at The Entertainment Quarter and sat for a Q&A after.
I was struck by the engine of the film and how slowly and unerringly, it knits together an
atmospheric, unrelenting and at times psychically penetrative experience of compression and loss for the main protagonist Arash, where his relationship is by turns a touchpoint of deep connection, sexual absolution, tenderness and above all, a corner
stone for his own personal poetry and sense of what 'is' and isn't. This is elevated by Palangi to an almost cautionary level as for me the film ratifies through Arash's journey that his idealism is flawed - and separate personal truths exist, often dormant in the body, felt and understood implicitly and often taking the mind a long time succumb to.
Such is Arash's crucible, and the axis in which the films spindles upon. The consolatory glimmer in which the journeys for these two characters pave the way for a deep personal reckoning, as they discover their love to be mimetic of the past. The masonry of Arash's thinking crumbling against the
reciprocal and embodied relationship Nazaneen is seeking and pulling towards. For me, as Arash is extricated from his country and the jurisdiction of his family, the Australian landscape protrude upon him to confront silently aching &
unanswered questions of what is within him.
We find him confounded and alienated,
forced to approach a literal forest of grief and complexity, that agitate him tectonically as the film find its centre. This is
bravely and painfully inculcated, and bravely embodied by Nazanin (Faezeh Alavi), and
his accompanying appraisal of his relationship with her. The derision she causes within
him through her opacity and the slow insinuation of her dishonesty. Alavis' portrayal of kinetic, beseeching and sometimes electrically unbounded femininity, also
creates a countering, and very real melancholia I related to as she painfully comes to understands
how his plea for traditional love poses to cripple her essence & ever prospecting carnality.
Within the crevasses of this tender and felt relationship lie incendiary and torrent mechanisms of will the other party partially wants to incorporate and cherishes, but partially wants to eviscerate and ignore.
I was left with considerations of the layers of fidelity, and a wider sense of what it means
interpersonally as betrayal is felt long before the suggestion of sex in this film, for both
parties, and slowly learns to speak itself as the silence and rabidness of the landscape
motivates them towards the change they both require. Also the complex interplay between space and female choice; the jurisdiction that holds Arash shackles Nazanin, what she finds in Australia disturbs Arash, what he longs for and keeps him replete and
sound in the relationship muzzles and seemingly beleaguers her fluidity and hunger. A
film with obvious political and current implications but also gently and silently reaches
a more mythic and primitive level about the complexities of relationship, change, and
space as means of release. Really enjoyable.