I Plant My Hand In The Garden Review: A Brilliantly Imaginative, Surprising Encounter With An Unorthodox Partnership

There are films whose sly subversions can take you by utter surprise. When cinema, despite bearing a socio-political weight, insouciantly breaks away and designs its own errant codes, it’s the rarest victory. Premiering in the Giornate degli Autori competition, an independent sidebar of Venice Film Festival, I Plant My Hand In The Garden is powered by spectacular storytelling freedom and an unbending political pulse that knows exactly what it’s fighting for. Directors Hoda Taheri and Boris Hadžija have achieved that elusive thing: a human, humorous, affecting, unflinchingly political drama that is as freely imaginative as specifically rooted. Time and space are thrown for a toss. At no point can you see where this might be heading.

Hoda and Boris also double as the lead actors in the tale of an unusual couple about to raise a child. When the film opens, Hoda, an Iranian refugee, has long relocated to Berlin, got citizenship and is planning her wedding. She’s getting married to Boris, a Serb. Her mother and sister have arrived to meet the fiancé and be there for her big day. But the mother’s visa for the Serbia trip is temporary, just for two weeks.  There’s frankness and humour leavening the scenes despite the rim of tension and anxiety. These are refugees who have had to rebuild their lives and retrace their desires in distant lands. When home itself is so troubled and riven with danger, how do you reconcile with your roots? The churn of political assimilation and acute peripheries always surges through the corners, hanging like a deadly pall, indirectly influencing every other decision.

Drawing from their lives but also twisting those into the ether of imagined anxieties, the film is as much an act of projection as a firm embodiment. It recognises the political framing of bodies, the contexts accompanying individuals and their fraught journeys. Borders become a ground of constant exploration, re-negotiation, demanding an overhaul. No identification is fixed, stable and static. Infused with bold fluidity, this film keenly understands the risks in any gesture of stamping identities onto a rigid framework. So, it pulls these disarming, startling sleights-of-hand with absolute confidence. Its approaches and shifts are radical but extremely sure-footed. It has this rock-solid conviction in traipsing through these lives, their dilemmas, decisions and conflicts and presenting them in ways that shift, disconcert and stun. A great film has clarity about how it can rearrange the familiar and make it seem afresh and blazingly alive.

It’s rife with charming bits. Watch out for a scene between the mothers of the couple. Divided by language, they plan how Hoda’s mother can extend the visa. Boris’ mother playfully suggests she could scout for a boyfriend. The two women laughingly bond, making light of the precarious situation, seizing joy from the most despairingly grim. This is just one in a beguiling, bewildering hall-of-mirrors structure where reality receives a jolting interruption. I Plant My Hand In The Garden is honest in confronting the set of social expectations undergirding identity, slicing through preconceived notions and exposing your own biases while encountering its characters and their revelations. Hoda’s mother talks to her and her sister, Hosna, about her sex life with their father, masturbation. They have had that conversation earlier too. The daughters know their mother hasn’t had the most liberating, fulfilling marriages.

Depression haunts both Hoda and Boris’ biological fathers. Both their mothers have also found new lovers, while the weight of masculinity and being perceived as a failure keep the earlier men stymied. The men of this older generation just flicker through as ghosts in this film. They are left behind and skulk in the shadows. Boris chafes at any imposition of fatherhood being a social imperative. Both he and Hoda would rather do these so-called socially mandated roles their own way.

Hoda is pregnant, something which Boris’ mother couldn’t have missed gauging but doesn’t acknowledge outright. Instead, the film veers into a brave, fuss-free exploration of the couple as sexual dissidents charting a life together that runs in clear rejection of the heteronormative and orthodox patterns of being. Boris is gay and both he and Hoda have different sexual partners. The intricacies of their relationship are peeled to unveil something far more complicated than first glimpse and yet wholly easy and justified.

The bridal dress turns into an opportunity to squeeze out money. The wedding isn’t seen but you get the framing, contours of their lives, the bunch of dire uncertainties. Amidst all the nerve-racking fragility of prising out an unconventional life, the film holds laughter and an ability to wink at cruel vagaries. There’s obviously loss of landscapes, the homeland now out of reach, preparing to redraw life on uncompromising personal terms. Passports come with their own emotional costs. Boris’ mother teases him about his ex-boyfriend while exclaiming on sexuality being fluid. I Plant My Hand In The Garden dissolves boundaries-sexual, political, social, weaving stunning resistance. The transgression, the disruption it poses, they flow loosely to a rhythm that’s not retrofitted to any prior schema. There might be mistakes and fumbles as is human. At least, the choices, within the limited scope at hand, are theirs. Even till its final scene, the film reserves its spirit of total mischievous defiance.