“ASIA” REVIEW | TRIBECA 2020

        [Note: This film is being screened as part of the International Narrative Competition of Tribeca 2020]

        Even though she’s a mother with a teenage girl at home, Asia can still attract a guy at the end of the bar until his girlfriend shows up. It’s a fairly mundane night out to herself, which I imagine is quite the indulgence once one becomes a parent. There is no doubt that her child comes first, but apparently still in her thirties and single, Asia has a life of experience still worth expanding and exploring in terms not exclusive to her motherhood. Unfathomable family crisis runs parallel to her singular path, and its navigation does not affect her as a wake up call, but rather a confirmation that she is true to all aspects of herself as woman and mother. With “Asia”, first time feature filmmaker Ruthy Pribar has crafted a portrayal of a parent and child’s dignified perseverance, together, through what for all of us are the most basic facts of life.

        Russian immigrants in Israel, Asia (Alena Yiv) is a hospital nurse, while her daughter Vika (Shira Haas) spends her days with her best friend hanging out at a skate park with guys. Sometimes weary, sometimes bold, always unseasoned, the teenagers’ time passes as explorations of their own expanding life experiences which of course orbit around sex; more the possibility of it than an understanding.

        It’s actually Asia who regularly has sex with a coworker, a doctor, in his parked car hidden from any onlookers. It’s mutually enjoyable, clearly routine, and the way they end up reclining in conversation on their respective front seats is a refreshing take on pillow talk.

        Meanwhile, sneaking a boy over for a drink, Vika bites off more than she can chew while playing at adulthood as they naturally veer toward sex. She’s into it, but needs another swig of cognac as the camera lingers on her pelvis. It was a striking choice of composition given that it’s the boy’s blunt point of view; the framing of the natural end game of his (and our?) expectations which takes an abrupt turn when at the subsequent sight of his junk, she is stunned into immobile rigidity.

        This entire sequence is fascinating given that most scenes like this in commercial cinema focus on faces, dependent on music to set the tone, and eventually an increase in the speed of editing or actors’ movements, resulting in a depiction of sex as poetry or music video. But Pribar presents foreplay as prose, more along the lines of directors Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne; that is, played out in real time, with a more restrained editing of shots, without any non-diegetic music or further stylization, almost as if we were actually in the room with these characters. Vika’s reaction to a first encounter with male anatomy is one I suppose many young women have had if not accustomed to today’s immediately available porn. But more than just killing the moment with the boy, the acute petrification of her body is the point on which the rest of the motion picture pivots.

        A medical physical shows that Vika has what is apparently amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, which we in the United States know more commonly as Lou Gehrig’s disease, becoming the axis on which her and her mother’s lives rotate from here on out. During the rapid deterioration of Vika’s motor skills, the brilliance of this picture is its ability to fuse the multitudes within and between both women – as women, as individuals, as parent and child, with this unignorable circumstance.

        Watching her mother flirt with a bartender in whom her provocations are clearly reciprocated, Vika tells her, “I’m going to die a virgin.”

        “The only thing I ever got from a man,” Asia tells her not unkindly, “is you.”

        As Asia divulges the nature of her own psychology when she approached sex for the first time half her life ago, describing it as something she had heard about and wanted to get over with, eventually growing into an experience she considered “nice,” Vika clearly cannot relate. Occupying her mental and hormonal space from a more empowered stance than perhaps it was for Asia at that age, the prospects of Vika’s desire, her right, to know for herself what her mother is talking about, have suddenly gone from the immature to the macabre.

        But the macabre means different things to different people. During their continued rendezvous, Asia and her lover’s ability to laugh about the marital situation of an elderly long term patient who just died in their care is less a reflection of crassness than their banal understanding that Mother Nature is and always will be undefeated. Seeing two healthcare workers sharing finite carnal pleasure amidst the complete, even professional, understanding of mortality lends a sense of wisdom and vitality to their lives onscreen and their ability to live in the now together.

        Previously compartmentalized, the parental, work, and sexual aspects of Asia’s life converge as Vika’s trips to her mother’s hospital increase in number and duration. Having already broken the ice on the topic of sex, they commiserate over good-looking male doctors passing by.

        Once they’ve returned home, Asia helps Vika do herself up with makeup as if preparing for a night out, which Asia has had the freedom to do even beyond what many would consider customary. The predicaments of Vika’s health having grown even more severe, to see them looking at themselves made up side by side in the mirror is some perversion of a memento mori, for indeed Mother Nature does always win but there are some things, like a child’s mortality preceding the parent’s, that reek of going against Her very precepts. “It suits you,” says Vika’s at-home male caretaker, another coworker of Asia’s, regarding the lipstick and rouge on the girl’s face.

        It’s during a private, intimate conversation in another room over drinks – a bit more of that good stuff of which grown people are familiar which she knows her daughter will likely never take part in – that Asia discretely tells him, “There are things I want her to have that I cannot give her.” He understands she’s referring to things, which he as a man, can. But despite her body’s failures, Vika shows it is in fact not beyond her means to take control in matters of sex.

        At the end of this motion picture, the bright sunlight with birdsong at the dawn of a new day outside a bedroom window cannot possibly be mistaken as sentimental, but as the stunning facts of life that persist, the reality of which is reflected no less within this bedroom than outside.

        “Asia” is a story of a mother and daughter that does not merely hit the beats inherent in such drama, nor does it take the route of “teaching” the joy of life despite its tragedies. Pribar presents the multifaceted and the quotidian, the erotic and the mundane, as a dichotomy inherent within the truths of life itself.