Myriam U. Birara’s THE BRIDE bears the semblance of some distant fairy tale, with a treacherous core nestled inside the figments of romance summoned by its title. The film's opening moments, too, are enshrined in a fleeting pastoral whimsy: our protagonist, young Eva (Sandra Umulisa)—her thick, downy curls cradled by white flowers like an exuberant wood sprite—plucks avocados out of a tree and chatters playfully with a relative wandering nearby. The woman's offscreen voice grows dimmer as she drifts farther and farther away with each distracted response. Then, the scene takes a terrifying turn. A strange man with a disconcerting smile approaches Eva, who already seems perturbed by his presence. We can reasonably imagine the threat he poses, but her face betrays a breadth of danger we have yet to grasp. As he grips her and she in turn attempts to wrest herself, more men descend upon her and carry the flailing girl away. Her chilling screams trail eerily behind her long after they have all disappeared from view.
The past does not merely intrude upon the present, it resides in every corner of the film, filling the space and brimming over with its host of phantoms.
Bride-kidnapping, or guterura—which has been translated to "lifting" or "carrying"—is an ancient custom where a man, assisted by his relatives and friends, snatches a girl (as young as twelve, by some accounts) and forces her into marriage. After the girl has been raped, her virginity and honour robbed, the husband will dispatch representatives to the victim's family to offer them some form of compensation. For once the marriage has been "consummated", there is little they can do.
Aching for testimony
Birara, herself Rwandan, sets THE BRIDE in the nation’s lush, green, and perennially haunted countryside. The opening scene announces the year as 1997, just three years after Hutu nationalists led the devastating genocide that claimed the lives of over 1,000,000 people, predominantly Tutsis. Well before its impact upon the psyche of the film’s characters inevitably surfaces, this deathly spectre casts a looming, unshakable shadow; a tragedy aching for testimony.
Women have traditionally been condemned to the domestic, where men reign in absentia as a matter of course. But in their shared isolation the pair forge an enduring connection.
"We need teachers around here," Eva's visiting aunts tell her matter-of-factly. This marriage has coldly curtailed the teenager's dreams of attending medical school and becoming a pediatrician. "Most were Tutsis. They were all killed. Others fled the country," they explain. In the next scene, a child stands before a homemade altar, mindlessly tracing the gold-rimmed frame of an unseen photograph. The camera cuts to reveal a lovingly arranged display of black-and-white photos, a memorial to the lost and dead. Eva later discovers that those pictured are not the relatives of her new husband but the family that had once lived in the house, before they either fled or were killed. The past does not merely intrude upon the present, it resides in every corner of the film, filling the space and brimming over with its host of phantoms. Far from a fairy tale, THE BRIDE is, in fact, a ghost story.
Much like Birara's previous short film HOME (2021)—about a young woman who escapes her abusive husband only to be met with her family's disapproval—THE BRIDE foregrounds troubled domesticity in an effort to contend with gendered conflicts and a culturally specific social order. Eva, understandably, does not accept her captivity with ease. She refuses to speak a word to her new husband, who often remains out of focus. Instead, the camera lingers in close-up on Eva, lying in bed, clutching her body tightly, her gaze defiantly far away when her eyes aren’t miserably squeezed shut. Her aunts are sympathetic to her situation perhaps, but above all pragmatic. They urge her to submit to her new circumstances.
Connection within condemnation
For her part, Eva staunchly refuses to reconcile herself to her unjust situation. Her one source of solace is found with the orphaned cousin of her new husband, and the film devotes much of its time to their burgeoning friendship. After all, both young women share a common condition: bound to the household, much of the time alone, and all this by design. Women have traditionally been condemned to the domestic, where men reign in absentia as a matter of course. But in their shared isolation the pair forge an enduring connection.
As an extension of the ambivalent domestic, hands become a central preoccupation of the film, populated by various scenes—close-ups and wide shots—of women working with their hands: preparing food, braiding a patch of bright-colored beads, washing laundry. But elsewhere, women's hands also promise the invasive process of labia stretching, believed to make sex more enjoyable for both partners. Eva's aunts gather around her on the bed before the scene cuts away; in the kitchen, spinach is readied upon a cooking tray—this is all routine—but Eva's screams shatter the grim silence, in yet another moment that emphasizes the film's core ghostliness. Of course, it is not just the house that is haunted, but the lakes and the grassy woods where scores of people were butchered. The unexpected amity that Eva fosters with her husband’s cousin complicates her urge to run away, but nor can Eva stay, doubly displaced in a house of strangers, seen and unseen.
Kelli Weston is Brooklyn-based film programmer and critic whose work has appeared in "Sight & Sound", "The Guardian", and "Film Comment", among other publications.
