Upshot (2024) by Maha Haj is a simple and softly brutal short film. Set in the near future in an indiscernible rain-slaked Mediterranean region, it concerns, at the outset, the aging lives of Suleiman and Mona as they make their food, talk of their childrens’ jobs, relationships, loves, their opportunities, and their futures. They look forward to the next visit from their children. They live with a begrudging respect for one another born from a tacit understanding that they have made their lives together for the last few decades, and so might as well spend the final ones together too. Silence hangs in their household air. They are divided on the screen by visual elements, often a doorway, but rarely are they depicted separately in separate frames. They are with each other in the frame or always close by, and this essential intimacy is at the core of their relationship. This gives the impression of a genuine affinity, a mutual interdependence and necessity to their relationship, which, with their little quips to one another, effectively shows them as still carrying some stilted love for eachother.
Such is the first half of Upshot. It is permeated by this pastoral and silent strain. You can see the wind in the trees and on the hills, hear the rain on the windows. You become gradually aware of an absence within the life of these two characters. The masterful nature of this film lies in such silence, and how it is used in service of its volta, which comes like a choke in the throat. The film changes in tone dramatically at its midpoint with the arrival of a third stranger, the reporter Khalil, as an intrusion to their lives from his red jacket and hasty, breathless tone, and his desire to interview them.
Here the film recontextualizes everything that came before it. Khalil asks them questions which reveal that Suleiman and Mona are living within a carefully crafted unreality. Their children, all five, were killed by rockets in Palestine by Israel, but Suleiman and Mona have continued on, moving far away, living off grid, acting as if all their children were still alive for presumably more than thirty years. The viewer is privy to this information, but Khalil is not. They invite Khalil to dinner, where they continue, to his shock, to talk of their children as if they are still alive, and indeed they recount to Khalil that their own son told them to relate his regards. The film ends with Suleiman and Mona continuing their conversation, Khalil sitting silent as the camera moves outward, out of their lives again.
It is this brilliant reveal that makes the film so emotionally powerful. The characters live in rejection of their trauma, attempting to create an insular world or a condition of the mind where their trauma has not happened. Their fictions are an attempt at escape, a rejection of history, experience, and time, and a turn of the mind’s faculties to an elimination of itself. Upshot is similar in its notions, themes and story to the novel The Emigrants by German author W.G. Sebald. Sebald depicts the lives and stories of several German Jews in the wake of the holocaust who survived through emigration. They live unrealities, as if the event that created the circumstances of their life did not happen. They live a silent and knowing mourning that they turn from in every opportunity, and always, at every turn it is there to face them again. As Sebalds’ character, the artist Max Ferber, whose parents were killed in concentration camps states, “Of those things we could not speak of we simply said nothing”.
It is this compulsion to turn from memory, to obliterate the truth of the selfs’ experience and its knowledge of itself, that Haj masterfully relates. Suleiman and Mona live a life of inexpressible emotional devastation, and their quiet survival is still a kind of survival. Khalils’ dehiscence is a violent emotional disruption to their insular mental protection, one they cannot live with, one they can barely address when Khalil speaks to them. Suleiman and Mona have moved past negation, into a world of a privately-created language, a privately-created history, into a life of willful, tragic, and exhausted delusion. Haj does not depict their unreality as a topic of debate: it is not a matter to be examined for its utilitarian benefits to their lives, to be weighed and judged. Khalil does not seek to shake them, he is too shocked. It is simply a fact of their existence now, one they themselves, like their memories of their tragedy, cannot possibly live without.
