The Eternal Daughter
I have been thinking about unmothering of late. Not in the sense of a necessary uncoupling of femininity from compulsory reproduction as maternity, but simply and more straightforwardly as a slow process of just letting your daughter be in the path she chooses to tread. But being made redundant is hard; what happens to my identity as mother when my child no longer wants to be mothered? I wrote “no longer wants mothering” earlier before editing those words into past tense, yet the original tense still tugs at me. And not unmothered but unmothering. Less an arrival but more a fitful, halting, unending preparatory process, one eye anxiously on time running out, when a mother has finally to relinquish her duty of care. I feel this acutely having an only child. But then I watched The Eternal Daughter and some of the issues it explores made me think of the mother-daughter relationship in quite a different way. What happens when you foreground the daughter and not the mother? What happens when the ‘you’ as ‘mother’ is not self-indulgently centre stage.
The Eternal Daughter, a 2022 film directed by Joanna Hogg, explores some of the terrain I’ve been thinking about—but from the daughter’s viewpoint. A short summary of the film is needed perhaps to enable readers of this essay to orientate themselves, but please note that there will be spoilers. Julie is the middle-aged daughter of Rosalind; both arrive at what seems to be remote countryside hotel as guests. The hotel was once a grand house that Rosalind was evacuated to as a child during the Second World War, a place which belonged to the family, but whose ownership details or facts of who domiciled there and when are only alluded to. Very little backstory is given. Julie is a filmmaker, and the return is on the occasion of her mother’s birthday, conceived also as a means of resurrecting memories of Rosalind’s past for the film that Julie is about to make, a process that will reveal also hitherto unmentioned painful memories of her mother’s miscarriage, and the death of a family member as a serving soldier. Rosalind says at one point, “I had all sorts of memories here; they are all alive.” The house as house, the objects in the house, are resonant with stories and memories
The film moves at a slow and leisurely pace with intimate exchanges between daughter and mother over the meals and reminisces, and exploratory journeys through the rooms and corridors of the great manor by the daughter especially. Much of the film is shot at night and in gloomy weather with the house’s outside shrouded in fog, and the house’s insides dimly lit. The few exchanges with the only other significant characters in the film come in the form of the seemingly truculent and less-than-cooperative receptionist, and a porter who also stays at the house. Carly-Sophia Davies with her scarcely suppressed roll of the eyes or her passive-aggressive blank stare does a good job of leavening the sombreness of The Eternal Daughter well. Hers is a minor but significant role, appearing only to see the guests in at her desk, or take dinner orders albeit reluctantly, but it is a performance that is delightful, providing small much needed doses of humour throughout. The rather sweet hotel porter/valet, Bill, played by Joseph Mydell, provides some emotional respite from the intensity of the mother-daughter relationship. Bill tells of the recent loss of his wife, providing a steer to viewers about loss as an absenting of the beloved but also a presence that haunts. Bill confesses that he has conversations with his deceased wife, and plays a flute for her (we hear the mournful sound of a flute at various points in the film); in his vulnerability and openness, Bill draws the confidences of both mother and daughter in his private conversations with each of them.
The film begins with a long taxi drive in the dark, flanked by a symmetrical avenue of trees on two sides of the driveway towards a grand house. During the drive, the taxi driver mentions his wariness about driving his customers to the house at night for he had seen a ghostly figure in the window on previous visits. These opening sequences might take us back to the Du Maurier-Hitchcock Rebecca, with its famous opening lines, “Last Night I dreamt of Manderlay”, and sets up expectations that we are about to see a film in the gothic mode. Chiaroscuro shots of Swinton as Julia at the window, close ups of her face with her eyes picked out by the lighting, seems to be a knowing cinematic hark back. Yet such generic expectations are played into and played with by Hogg. Indeed, the taxi driver’s cautionary remarks, the fog that shrouds the house, and the daughter’s repeated looking at the unoccupied annex in the garden at night when walking her dog may well lead many viewers to expect that the film that is in the haunted house mode. But the ethereal woman at the window, looking vaguely like her mother and seen when from the outside of the annex, makes only a fleetingly appearance in one scene. The Eternal Daughter wears its generic delineations very lightly and uses some of its gothic delineations instead as a means to address loss, grief, memory and time as understood within the all-encompassing intensity of the daughter-mother dyad. Julie seems, of course, to be an only child.
On the day of Rosalind’s birthday, Julie wraps gifts she has brought with her and sets them out on the small dinner table that they will both share. Julie, sitting where Rosalind will be, arranges her gifts in a suitable way before then getting up to sit on the chair on the opposite side of the table to look at her arrangement. Her mother arrives a little later, and expresses her delight at one of the gifts just unwrapped. At this point, Rosalind mentions that she hasn’t been feeling very well and wants to skip the meal, suggesting that she could simply take pleasure in Julie’s eating. Julie who has orchestrated this special dinner seems deeply disappointed, and fusses over her mother; there follows an outburst on Julie’s part… for she has planned the dinner event meticulously -- even down to the lit birthday cake, which she takes from the now slightly bewildered looking hotel receptionist to present to her mother. Hogg then allows us to see that there is no mother to receive this; the birthday cake is presented to just air and an empty chair.
That Tilda Swinton plays both Julie and Rosalind is a real stroke of genius, making us react to the roles that she plays, and the positions they occupy in a reflexive way. The first time we encounter the full force of this doubling is as a shock (especially if we haven’t read reviews earlier). This occurs near the start of the film, after Swinton as Julie returns to the taxi to fetch her mother to help her into the hotel. She emerges from the dark interior of the text to be recognisably Swinton. For an actor to so plainly be both—mother and daughter—comes across as an uncanny moment, but it also encourages viewers to think of mothers and daughters as not unique individuals as such, or distinct characters, but as structural positions women occupy perhaps at different points in their lives. As women we are both Persephone and Demeter at different points, as Evan Boland says as much in her much quoted poem, “The Pomegranate”,
And the best thing about the legend is
I can enter it anywhere. And have.
The film explores and exploits this. Julie is a filmmaker, film making is of course a fiction of role play among other things. Hogg reminds us pointedly of this—as if we need reminding—in the birthday dinner scene. Swinton as Julia sits on the side of the table where her mother will sit later, arranging her array of birthday gifts, quite deliberately before going to the opposite side to consider her handiwork. That Hogg also enables us to see Julie offering to blow out that singular candle on the birthday cake also brings an unexpected jolt, especially when we are allowed to then see that her mother isn’t there. The sequence suggests that one position is constituted, made possible (only?) by another: someone has to be at the receiving end, even if imaginary, for this to be a daughterly gift and outreach. The mother’s position in this film is constituted as a hollowed out presence – an absence that enables the daughter’s position to come into sharp focus.
We almost never see Swinton doubling as both mother and daughter in the same frame as could have been achieved with use of a split screen or an actor double. Except for one single shot, we are offered a distinct positional perspectives—the subjective point of view of Julia or her mother—in addition to the more ‘objective’ disembodied, third person camera perspective that often enables narrative continuity between positions and frames. The daughter’s position is bound to the mother’s position as a mirroring of each other, a twinning so to speak. My mother Myself. There are reflective surfaces throughout. Yet this hall of mirrors does not stop there but pulls us, the viewers, into the frame as well. In the hotel, Julia looks out of the window at what is happening outside; we see Julie from the outside of the hotel at the window looking out; Julie sees a spectral figure looking out of the annex’s window. The first and second is undertaken sometimes as a shot-reverse-shot which allows us to view the scene from Julia’s vantage point and also be someone on the outside of the house looking on at the window; in the third case scenario, if we can’t literally see what the spectral figure in the annex sees, that figure also returns us to Swinton at the window, thus allowing us to imagine the uncanny, impossible, doubling of views.
But all this impersonal and abstract discussion about positions and cameras gives the lie to The Eternal Daughter’s emotional heart: a film about loss or impending loss, its affects and effects. Julia’s anguish over her mother’s ageing and impending death is full of pathos. Like the child who wants simply to please, “I want to do what you want”, Julia comes over as a petulant child at times. But at other times, she fusses over every aspect of her mother’s welfare -- mothering Rosalind even. At one point, Rosalind speaks to Bill of her regret that Julia has no offspring to mother for her daughter would have been a very good mother; Rosalind then observes (almost too casually) that she, Rosalind, is now the child in their current relationship. The emotional anguish on Julia’s part about how to care for Rosalind is almost palpable; Julia remarks to her mother at the birthday dinner,
I just want you to be happy; I’m trying all the time to make you happy. I can’t keep guessing. Can’t you just tell me. You’re like a mystery person to me. I spent all of my life doing this, trying to figure out how. And I have a life of my own; I have a husband which I neglect completely. And I don’t have any children. And I won’t have anybody to fuss over me when I’m your age.
Her mother becomes sphinx-like to her; there is a desire to know and anticipate what she is thinking but, equally, a failure to do so. In the death bed scene, glimpsed briefly, puzzlingly and proleptically in the middle of the film, and then more logically nearer the end of the film, we are simply shown a grasping of hands, and an exchange of looks that suggests love and understanding. No words. This made me think whether my preoccupation with unmothering—as a back handed way of mothering—is not profoundly narcissistic and self-indulgent at some level. Letting go is necessary. Love is part of the letting go; love is also part of why memories remain. And it is memories that distort time with their continued importance and relevance.
Bill the porter features as the sage-like figure who tells Julia not to fret, that she is doing everything right even when she feels she isn’t making her mother happy. At one point, he says of his deceased wife,
There are memories those that I have with my wife which are not happy. I make my rounds and, of course, that’s when the memories flood back. I suppose it is a way of staying in touch… And I can understand you wanting to make a film of your mother as a way of staying in touch, to keep that sense of, that relationship with her.
These lines make absolute sense when we realise that The Eternal Daughter plays with diegetic time, often using scenes that would be chronologically later in the story earlier. Time past is sometimes time present. Is Julia’s presence in the hotel actually a return after the death of her mother, in addition to the first visit with Rosalind when she was first preparing to make a film? That would certainly explain the shock of the dinner without the birthday mother, the spectral mother-like figure in the annex window, and those death bed scenes.
The Eternal Daughter is shot and edited so very carefully for viewers to think initially that time is simply unfolding chronologically. In retrospect, and when we see the film for the second time, what we take to be a shared twin bedroom seems at times to be just occupied just by one. Yet such metafictional playfulness isn’t there to foreground the artifice of film form as such, but as a way to convey feelings of loss and melancholy, “a way of staying in touch”. But there’s, of course, also another way to read this Mobius loop: Rosalind and Julia could be said to be both mother and daughter. My daughter Myself. An eternal loop. Returning us to Boland’s remarks about the legend of Persephone and Demeter, “I can enter it anywhere. And have.” I read in an interview that Hogg’s own mother died during the editing of the film. The film is a testament to a desire to return to an earlier time and state. To be an orphaned daughter is, of course, to be nobody’s child.
That the film is perplexing invites us to puzzle, and Julia’s wanderings through the house, her desire to figure things out (including Julia’s pondering of the receptionist’s extra-curricular activities when she looks out from the window); the fog that shrouds the house, seem to be signifiers of a mystery that needs to be unravelled, making material and visceral the viewer’s own sorting out of the pieces. For that reason, the film’s ending—the lifting of the fog, dawn and the sound of bird song, the departure of Julia helped into a taxi by Bill, the drive away into the now clear landscape—just seems too neat. Closure is suggested but closure is precisely what we don’t have in the duration of the screening The Eternal Daughter. Or in real life.
But what else
can a mother give her daughter but such
beautiful rifts in time?
If I defer the grief I will diminish the gift.
The legend will be hers as well as mine.
She will enter it. As I have.
