REVIEW BY MARGARET ALLUM
Me, You, Them
Directed by Andrucha Waddington
With Regina Case, Lima Duarte, Stenio Garcia and Luiz Carlos Vasconcelos
Screened at the Sydney Film Festival, June 6-22
If you saw Central Station, you'll have an idea of the atmosphere created by director Andrucha Waddington in this Brazilian film. Waddington worked on Central Station, and while Me, You, Them is set in a very poor rural area of Brazil, not in the city, it has the same quirkiness.
Me, You, Them is a film about sexual freedom and the essence of the family unit. A hit at the 2001 Sundance Film Festival, it is the story of Darlene, her children, and the three men who become her husbands.
Darlene has an unconventional beauty, a presence that beguiles and seduces men and an uncomplicated and unashamed enjoyment of the success of her dalliances.
Unfortunately, one of her seductions results in her being pregnant with her first child. The father and husband-to-be leaves her waiting alone at the church. Unwed, she leaves her mother and heads off to the city to start a new life, promising to bring back the child for her mother's blessing. Three years' later, she's back in the small village, only to find herself once again, alone.
But someone has noticed her return. A much older neighbour is willing to share his newly built house with her, and take on her child. It's a reasonable arrangement at first, and Darlene agrees to this marriage, only later to realise that the man she married is almost criminally lazy and has really earned himself a cook, cleaner and housemaid. With few other options, however, she stays and soon she is pregnant again.
The family unit seems complete — with just one small discrepancy: the new born is closer in looks to the handsome black man she was flirting with around nine months prior, than to her pale-skinned husband. Eyebrows are raised, but nothing is said.
Time passes and her attentions turn to her husband's cousin, now a permanent house guest, also middle-aged and pathetically grateful for her love and affection. Soon too, their union is blessed with a child. Suspicions multiply, but it is only with the advent of her third open dalliance with a very handsome young interloper that her legal husband is driven to take action — but it's not quite the action that is expected.
You, Me, Them examines an unconventional conjugal arrangement that still conforms in an odd way to some of the conventions of the "acceptable" family unit, however it also raises some interesting questions. Does being the legal husband of a woman make a man father to the children she bears during the marriage? Can a women successfully live with three men as her legal and de facto husbands?
Most film depictions of multi-spousal marriage are concerned with men who have multiple wives. It is viewed as most unusual for a woman to have more than one husband, and is frowned on in most societies. Yet polyandry is not unheard of in some parts of the world.
Does this leave a woman as a servant to multiple men or does it give her freedom of sexual association with several partners? This question is largely dependant on the status of women within a particular society, and in the case of Darlene, it is a mixture of both, although her first, and legal, husband is the only one who treats her like a maid. But then, he owns the house, and in the desperate poverty of Darlene' life, this is nothing to take lightly. The final scenes, in a strange way, both challenge and reinforce the notion of the nuclear family.
You, Me, Them is a very likable film. The radiance that actor Regina Case brings to the hard-working Darlene is totally absorbing. This is a woman who is strong enough to brave the harsh realities of her circumstance, yet seizes the joy of human relations. She heartily enjoys the carnal pleasures of life, yet is accepting of the abundant consequences of her actions (contraception is not a big part of life it seems in Catholic rural Brazil), and even when she is forced to make one of the most difficult sacrifices of her life for her first child, she is strong enough to move on.
Humourous and touching, this is a film that really appealed to the Sydney Film Festival audience, whose hearty applause at the conclusion was much stronger than the often only polite acclamation for some of the other festival films. I will be very disappointed if You, Me, Them is not brought back to Australia for a cinema season.