I don’t love you as if you were a rose of salt, topaz,
or arrow of carnations that propagate fire:
I love you as one loves certain obscure things,
secretly, between the shadow and the soul.
Pablo Neruda, Extract from One Hundred Love Sonnets: XVII
“You’re asking me…if I love that boy? I do. Sometimes. God only knows why. Honestly, he’s not handsome. He’s not even likeable. He’s drunk day and night and his hands shake. Frankly, that’s rather unattractive”, says Her in Director and cinematographer Daria Geller’s Him & Her — a modern interpretation of Russian playwright Anton Chekhov’s He & She; a short story written in the 19th century consisting of letters between two lovers.
An ode to Russia’s sombre and melancholic aesthetic, the explorations of Geller’s Him & Her sit in love’s states of ambivalence; between its Shadow and the Light, an anti-fairytale tale of sorts textured with a particular rawness of feeling meditating on love’s many faces.
Although filmic in form, something about Daria Geller’s Him & Her — its evocative quietness, its unflinching manner in the face of “dark truths” and its steadfastness in not seeking to make tidy the theatre of human experience(s) — reminds me of the literary works of Russian writers such as Ivan Turgenev and Fyodor Dostoevsky.
Born and raised in Moscow, Geller’s work is delicately laced with a visceral sincerity and rawness of emotion that seeks to shed light on some of life’s most intimate moments — and this affective approach to her cinematic craft is beautifully rendered in her first narrative short film with Him & Her.
She’s capricious and unstable. She doesn’t have an opinion about anything. She drank away half her career, and will soon drink away the rest. She’s unorganised. To love her, you either have to be…You have to be me, or insane. I guess those are the same things.
Shot over three days in Moscow and featuring garments by Russian labels Lesyanebo and Brier-wear, Him & Her is set across three distinct locations picked for their clear Soviet design: Hotel Che, Hotel Uzkoe and the Central House of Architecture.
Focusing on the unsaid, at its core one could say that Geller’s short film explores complicated, perhaps even toxic dynamics of love, away from our romanticised and idealised versions of it; between the shadow and the soul where love and hate form two sides of the same coin.
The 17-minute long short film consists mostly of the internal dialogues of its two main characters — Him played by Evgeniy Kharitonov and Her played by Miriam Sekhon — a universal naming of specific characters for a universally, yet, specifically felt feeling.
As we watch, listen to and feel Geller’s short film — which is reminiscent in tone to the mumblecore style of cinema — the scope of where the characters end and where we begin sometimes feels blurred, their thoughts and existential internal dialogues about love perhaps reminding us of our own past experiences and feelings. An extract from the film’s press release reads:
‘Him & Her’ explores how when we love most of our time is spent dealing with mundane tasks, waiting for those rare moments of love for which we are willing to go through anything. In the film this is shown when the [femme] lead goes on stage to perform, as this is the moment her lover falls in love all over again.
We never hear her sing, as nothing in the world could ever be as beautiful as the way he hears her voice. Similarly, though she performs to an audience, she relishes in being adored by him.
With every scene gradually turning redder and redder as we approach the moment of her being on stage, they are both fully aware that as soon as the performance is over and they return to their rooms everything will go back to being grey.
In her review of Him & Her and in her interview with Geller, Chelsea Lupkin writes, “Love isn’t a condition, but rather the act of choosing to be with someone every day, even if that relationship can sometimes feel unbearable. The exploration of this choice is what makes Daria Geller‘s Him & Her so compelling and refreshing to watch.”
As I sit thinking through her words and Geller’s film, I can’t help but reflect on my own subjective relationship with love, its reasons and possibilities have evolved — how I’ve begun to think and relate to it as a doing word — an embodied practice that says something about the love we witnessed as children, our political selves and our desires.
Love as something like when Toni Morrison wrote in Paradise;
Let me tell you about love, that silly word you believe is about whether you like somebody or whether somebody likes you or whether you can put up with somebody in order to get something or someplace you want or you believe it has to do with how your body responds to another body…You can only earn — by practise and careful contemplations — the right to express it and you have to learn how to accept it. Which is to say you have to earn God. You have to practice God. You have to think God — carefully.
How I have begun to realise that sometimes, love alone is not enough, and sometimes our choosing of love has more to do with our past hurts and/or projections of romanticised ideals of love onto other people. And that other possibilities of love can exist in choosing not to be with someone every day, especially when that relationship can feel unbearable.
Credits:
Director: Daria Geller
Script: Asia Fix, Daria Geller
Producers: Yuval Orr, Daria Geller
Executive Producer: Iftach Aloni
Line Producer: Yana Kurbatova
Cast:
Him: Evgeniy Kharitonov
Her: Miriam Sekhon
Nadya: Anna Bochalova
Alexey: Evgeniy Shwartz
Sveta: Irina Nosova
Driver: Alexandr Tumbler
