Beloved

Released 2022. Director: Bishrel Mashbat

BELOVED BEGINS BY SHOWING US A SERIES OF CLASSICAL PAINTINGS including 'The Kiss' by Francesco Hayez and 'The Nightmare' by Henri Fuseli. Sheer curtain at an open window catches a light breeze. Romance, misery, stillness – the themes are signalled in the prefatory sequence.

The mixed-race couple’s names are Anar (Iveel Mashbat) and Kassy (Jana Miley). If there was love between them we don’t see it. Whether or not they’ve acknowledged the fact to each other, the truth is felt by both of them and to a detached third-party outside looking in, the fracture is obvious. To simply blame it on cultural differences, as Anar's Mongolian friends imply, would be evasive without also examining other factors.

How they’ve come to this point after five years of marriage doesn’t seem to be as important as what they’ll do, now that they’re dissatisfied, unhappy, and unfaithful.

This is director Bishrel Mashbat’s second feature film, which also reunites him with some cast members from his debut, the moody kidnap drama In the Land of Lost Angels (2019). As a director Mashbat is a visual storyteller and you can see the care and thought he’s put into his shots.

In telling a small, intimate story about a couple drifting apart, Mashbat films Beloved in 4x3 aspect ratio, effectively limiting the space and boxing in his characters. Instead of placing Anar and Kassy on two ends of a wide screen, Mashbat slyly emphasises the space between them. When the camera observes the couple asleep in bed, it’s the space between them we come to notice. When they sit next to each other in the car, the gap between them occupies the most space. Beloved feels like a series of vignettes, each one accentuating the couple’s disconnect and resentment.

The movie is light on dialogue. Mashbat prefers to tell the story through his camera placement and shows us what he wants us to notice. In long, often stationary shots, we view the characters from a few paces away, sometimes through a doorway, sometimes from the backseat of a car. What this creates is the sense that we’re intruders on their personal space. We peek at their private moments as they step into the shower, go to the bathroom, or process difficult thoughts about their future together.

Beloved is told in a clear-eyed, clinical approach that gives us an objective look and doesn’t invite us to take sides. Perhaps it’s because we don’t know enough about the unhappy couple to empathise or feel connected – what makes them lovable, what makes them sympathetic, what are their foibles, what redeems them.

The minimalist approach to revealing dialogue amplifies the communication gulf between Anar and Kassy. On the other hand this also curtails a deeper understanding of Anar and Kassy as fully developed characters, their hopes, fears, frustrations and compromises. Beloved is likely to make you contemplate the sadness and fragility of this young marriage but as a portrait of a marriage break-up, it’s more intellectual than emotional.

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