From Omeleto.
A woman celebrates her birthday without her mother.
WHEN THE SAINTS COME MARCHING BACK is used with permission from Gerardo Tassan. Learn more at https://instagram.com/gerardosatan.
Norma is celebrating her birthday, the first one since her mother died. The remaining family has gathered together for a meal with Norma, but the celebration is not without its melancholy — or its bickering.
Norma gets her cake and makes her wishes, and the party seems business as usual. But then an unexpected visitor arrives in the form of Norma’s dead mother Irma, fulfilling one of Norma’s wishes — for better or for worse.
Directed and written by Gerardo Tassan, this darkly funny and imminently relatable short family drama has a wry sense of humor and a matter-of-fact and dry acceptance of its quirky premise. In accepting Irma’s reappearance at face value, the film explores how family dynamics endure, even underneath the sentimentality of grief that death and passing can provoke. The film’s cleverness comes from how it punctures the way families can sanctify the dead in the process of grief, often glossing over the thornier aspects of character and relationships.
The storytelling has a loose, textured feeling, emphasizing the constant interplay of family members and their personalities, crammed together in the confined time and space of the family dining room during a special occasion. The continuous murmur of dialogue and the restlessness of the camerawork come together with the faded, worn-in look of the cinematography to give a sense of lived-in timelessness.
But when Norma makes a wish and her dead mother reappears with little fanfare, it introduces a surreal element in the narrative, though the film’s style and its characters take this development in their stride. Instead, Irma’s visit is much like any other family visit, and the dialogue has some imaginative fun when her family peppers the former family matriarch about life in heaven.
But Irma has another agenda: to win a "sweeping" contest in heaven among all the potential "grim reapers," which means bringing as many family members as she can back with her. Norma becomes angry at her manipulative mother, played by actor Ines Martin with a relish and glee that arcs from sweet to mischievous over the course of the film. Actor Irma Lusewicz plays Norma with the love, resentment and anger of a long-suffering daughter. Even after Irma’s death, she can’t escape from her overbearing mother or her stratagems.
The ultimate punchline of WHEN THE SAINTS COME MARCHING BACK is that a dysfunctional parent-child relationship can stay dysfunctional, even when one of the parties has passed away. Yet the final zinger at the end affirms that, for many, family is one thing we can’t live without, even if they drive us crazy — both in life and beyond the grave.
