From Omeleto.
A woman gets a nose job.
BREAK/FIX is used with permission from Amanda Pinto. Learn more at https://lilianatandon.com.
Lily is getting plastic surgery done on her nose, a feature that she has always felt self-conscious about. But as she’s undergoing anesthesia during the procedure, she enters into a vision or hallucination where she meets the Indian grandmother she never knew — the ancestor that she inherited her nose from.
Lily and her grandmother talk, and during the conversation, she becomes attuned to the cultural heritage that she’s always felt distant from. In doing so, she gains a new appreciation for all aspects of it — just as she’s on the verge of losing one of the most physical and palpable parts of it.
Directed by Amanda Pinto from a script written by Liliana Tandon, who also plays the lead role of Lily, this thoughtful, visually stylish short drama focuses on a woman meeting a lost aspect of herself, which has affected her identity, sense of self and confidence. Lily has always judged her nose as imperfect and flawed, and she’s finally taken the step to smooth out the bump on her nose. But in the limbo made possible by anesthesia, she meets the source of that bump and learns to see and feel differently.
Well-paced and thoughtful, the storytelling quickly sets up Lily’s state of mind just before the surgery, excited about fixing her flaw and taking off as she enters the netherworld of imagination. That limbo is sensuous with heritage and spirit, dreamlike with images from Indian mythology and epics and ethereal, luminous colors and light. It’s presided over by the warm and regal figure of Lily’s grandmother, whom she has never met. As the two women meet and talk, Lily must explain herself to her grandmother, who doesn’t understand why she is undergoing rhinoplasty.
Lily is eloquent about why she feels as she does, citing social media’s gleaming images of perfection and the pressures to live up to them. But as Lily’s grandmother probes deeper, she unearths a deeper element for her granddaughter’s reasoning: her nose is a family trait on her family’s Indian side, and in fixing it, she also erases the visual signs of her ethnic heritage. The grandmother is compassionate about Lily’s feelings, but she also expresses great sorrow that Lily cannot see the same beauty she does. The deep empathy and love that her grandmother extends allows for a deeper spiritual connection to Lily, and under that warmth, Lily begins to realize she may lose more than that bump in her nose.
Compassionate, visually striking and compelling, BREAK/FIX is a deeply personal story, echoing the writer and lead actor’s feelings about her heritage and physical appearance. The storytelling is non-judgmental about plastic surgery, but it gently probes at the motives behind it, gently questioning why perfection means ironing out the differences of our backgrounds and ancestry to achieve our ideals. And though the overall tenor of the film is warm and empathetic, it is also unflinching of the drasticness of plastic surgery itself. Though Lily may gain in conventional beauty at the end, she loses a palpable connection to her heritage — and is left asking what is broken in the end.
