Faces Awash In Light: “Ancestors” (dir. David Turpin)

Cryptic images accompanied by an ageless text, albeit strangely different, as voice-over: director David Turpin’s debut opens with a medium shot of a female character in black dress and a quote from the Polari Bible, a translation into LGBTQ+ jargon, occasionally drawing from French, Italian and Cockney. If this secret language dates back to the 1920s, when it emerged as a result of the fact that, in Britain and beyond, queer relationships were punishable by law and therefore had to be pursued anonymously, the Polari Bible itself was written and performed only in 2004. The film is set around 1988, but this is of very little importance: Ancestors is neither an encyclopaedia entry, nor a historical treatise.

In the Polari Bible, God is given a new name and becomes Gloria. Part of a Pantheon studded with actresses from The Golden Age of Hollywood, the personal God of Maurice (Rupert Everett) is also a Gloria, diva, muse and spiritual protector. To describe her, screenwriter and director Turpin borrows a detail from Elizabeth Taylor’s biography: an emergency tracheostomy brought on by a bout of pneumonia, leaving a scar that the actress never did feel the need to hide. It is this Gloria we see at the beginning of the film, while black will come to signify mourning only in the third act.

As is the case with the two Glorias, neither of whom is Swanson, Turpin sows the seeds of narrative confusion from the very beginning: in one scene, we meet Tiny (Jack Wolfe); in the next, he has already fled the house he had come to share with Beau (Éanna Hardwicke), who is searching for him frantically, a sign that an unmistakeably strong relationship of one kind or another has already taken shape between the two. This is followed by Tiny’s second encounter with the protagonist, then another stage in Beau’s detective-like pursuit, and so on. Their mutual addiction to one another is constructed in tandem with an acutely painful feeling of craving. It is a world that is difficult to navigate, although one could argue that the narrative is never really at the heart of this film.

Initially cautious, if not altogether jealous of him, Beau eventually comes to watch over Tiny, just as Maurice, protector par excellence, together with Shell, the confidante played by Jessica Reynolds, come to watch over Beau towards the end. The presence of the never named epidemic that marked the 1980s weighs heavily on Turpin’s film, an elegiac hymn and, at the same time, an unclassifiable visual and aural spectacle.

Over unlikely long periods of time, the characters seem to just pose, their faces flooded with a wash of white, blue or some other colur, always in danger of being swallowed up by darkness. Is it the end of all ends that’s threatening to engulf them? Impossible to say. The epidemic and the tension that stems from it are everywhere, so they may well be there too, just as easily as black simply makes all things not black more visible. Yet Ancestors is also a succession movements in slow-motion, of characters walking to spectral, languorous music along streets dark and lit, of figures gliding past walls bearing portraits of those who are no longer, from Dietrich and Josephine Baker to Tiny.

The passage from desire to devotion, yearning, pain, and ultimately death is imperceptible. Dreams, hallucinations and imaginings are almost always in black and white; reality is in color, but the boundaries between the two are never entirely clear in Ancestors, a labyrinthine and hypnotic chronicle of silhouettes that are lost in the shadows, like outlines that merge.

Article initially published on fipresci.org