Chloe Abrahams’s The Taste of Mango (2023) is about getting close. Throughout the poignant, essayistic documentary, Abraham uses two photographic modes. The first is a close-up, which is most frequently on her mother, the beloved subject of the filmmaker’s video and smartphone cameras. Abrahams shoots interviews with her mother in close-up, but also captures her working and in repose in her cozy home in the United Kingdom. She talks on the phone, sings country music to herself in the bathtub, dyes her lush, brown hair, and handles the titular mango with her brightly polished nails. These shots are deeply intimate, at once gently protective, yet constantly searching—the cinematographic equivalent of an extended hand that caresses and explores. Abraham seeks to understand her mother, and the close-up becomes a powerful visual embodiment of this. But, as we come to learn later, the seer is always present in the filmmaker’s chosen mode. Abraham and her handycam often appear in reflections, and she’s looking to be understood as well. Abrahams’s second mode moves in even closer, an extreme close-up that often, as with an entrancing shot of flowing water that looks like pulsating dots, creates abstraction out of otherwise familiar imagery. But the result isn’t a deeper sense of connection; instead, it feels like the unfocusing of one’s eyes, or like looking off into the distance at nothing in particular while processing something heavy or unnerving. It’s a cinematic form of introspection, of taking a moment.
These reprieves are essential because The Taste of Mango does, in fact, process extremely heavy subject matters. Abraham’s mother recounts how her alcoholic stepfather abused her as a teen while growing up in her native Sri Lanka. Around that time, she was also raped, and though it was dark and she wasn’t exactly sure who did it, it’s very likely it was her stepfather. Abrahams’s grandmother, who appears throughout the film, made the decision to stay with her second husband for about 40 years despite her knowledge of her daughter’s abuse. Unsurprisingly, this creates tension between the three generations of women, even as they remain loving presences in each other’s lives.
The film heartbreakingly reveals how sexual abuse has affected all three women, both personally and in relation to each other. It shows, in daring nuance, how trauma, both its individual and generational versions, remains present among the joyous, momentous, and banal moments of life. With her POV-driven approach, Abrahams creates an elegant and patient film that avoids narrative or dramatic sensationalism, offering instead a portrait of connection and emotional truth.
The Taste of Mango screens this afternoon, December 4, and throughout the week, at DCTV Firehouse Cinema. Director Chloe Abrahams will be in attendance for a Q&A this evening.
