Memories of a Burning Body: the experiences of three women converge in this mesmeric docudrama
Three Costa Rican women are incarnated into a 71-year-old woman in Antonella Sudasassi’s graceful exploration of ageing and sexual desire.
Antonella Sudasassi’s Memories of a Burning Body, a semi-fictional distillation of the lives of three Costa Rican women, begins by breaking the fourth wall. Such a move usually gestures towards artifice: the false fairytale of a girl surviving starvation in The Wonder (2022), the fathomless self-reflexivity of The Souvenir Part II (2021), or a certain sardonicism in About Dry Grasses (2023) wrenching us out of its immersive, wind-rattled landscape.
Sudasassi’s film works to the opposite effect, clearing the decks and pre-emptively deconstructing its own stratagems. Revealing the disarray of its set (an apartment) and the chaos of cast and crew before filming starts, it makes clear that it aims for honesty, even if what follows is a somewhat dreamlike flouting of reality’s rules. An opening title card informs us this is “the conversation I never had with my grandmothers”. Part documentary, it is built upon the anonymous testimonies of a trio of real women: Ana, Patricia and Mayela. Their witheringly frank commentary, an interweaving of three distinct narrators, props up the drama.
An excursion into the past is made by the three women, chimerically merged into one in the form of ‘The Woman’ (Sol Carballo), a 71-year-old widow. She roots through a flat that teems with personal -history, rummaging through old belongings, rusty tin boxes and faded photo albums. Her everyday pottering is made more fantastical by the literal intrusion of memories. At the mention of chickens, a brood wanders into shot; younger versions of herself (Paulina Bernini Víquez and Juliana Filloy Bogantes) stride blithely in and out of frame; a room metamorphoses into a makeshift fairground.
Sex – which the film argues is unreasonably taboo – is the springboard for dialogue. Topics ranging from the stifling of female desire to sex education, abuse and ageing’s impact on sexuality are all gracefully touched upon. Motherhood, and the patriarchal pressures it places on women, is a concern also present in Sudasassi’s gently defiant debut feature The Awakening of the Ants (2019). Both are fuelled by the cyclical nature of misogyny in society, a point driven further home by the timelessness of the septuagenarian narrative in Memories of a Burning Body.
The film doesn’t dwell too long on darker memories, however, nimbly moving between light and shadow. As well as a rumination on the meaning of womanhood, the film is a celebration of its subjects and a homage to the freedom of old age. It’s a mesmeric trip down memory lane that’s well worth taking.
► Memories of a Burning Body is in UK cinemas now.