Beatrice (Teresa Catherine) travels the desert to an abandoned bunker, where she’s tucked away Bea (Sloane Cherry), her inner child. They spend the day together, doing all of their favorite things, before Beatrice makes the ultimate betrayal. Leaving the two changed forever.
DANIEL: Written by Teresa Catherine and directed by Emily Lerer, interiorem pueri (inner child) is a new short film currently making the rounds at film festivals. Described as a “reverse coming-of-age”, the film centers on the difficulty and pain associated with the loss of one’s inner child on the journey to maturity. More specifically it symbolically presents the hardening that people undergo as they now begin to view previous childhood dreams and imagination as something unattainable, or unrealistic.
From its opening shots of Beatrice driving through the desert through the dark, foreboding entry into the bunker, into the bright pink ‘girly’ room where young Bea is kept, the film visualizes the psychology of the themes that it is exploring while effectively and engagingly telling the story of this character at two life stages. Most striking to me is the cinematography by Carrie Morgan Glassman, where the mood of each environment and corresponding emotions of Beatrice/ Bea become perfectly captured and relayed to the viewer. The mise en scène is also fantastic, from the bag of snacks in the car to the glorious pink colors of Bea’s room/prison. The latter strongly reminded me of Alain Berliner’s masterpiece Ma vie en rose (My Life in Pink) similarly telling a story of innocence and inner child dreams, albeit with a transgender theme in that film.
But beyond simply telling a “reverse coming-of-age” fantasy tale with this film, I feel that Catherine and Lerer (along with the entire female-dominated team that made this short film) end up saying something interesting here about how their theme applies particularly to women. But maybe Shaun has thoughts on all this first…
SHAUN: The visual choices here are particularly potent. You pointed out the bright colors of the prison-like room for the literal manifestation of Beatrice’s inner child; that is strongly contrasted against dirt roads, desert-like colors, and a more muted color palette. We get this firm sense that the world outside of this prison is one that batters you down. It isn’t life-like, dreamy, wondrous. It’s harsh and dirty. Even Beatrice’s singing in her car takes place in a contained space (the car), almost like a metaphor for all the ways the world of adulthood contains and limits the joyful and freeing expression of childhood (there’s more to say here, but I don’t want to spoil every inch of this 10-minute short).
I also agree that this film is a distinctly gendered telling. This is not a criticism, though. The visual and narrative choices are all archetypally “feminine,” from the bright pink décor to the activities and speech of the characters. What the film doesn’t tell us explicitly is what has happened that adult Beatrice has kept this inner version of herself locked away. We get some clear hints based on the things she says, but much of this is left to our imagination. Since it is so distinctly gendered, the audience’s imagination can take two different trains: one about the pressures of adulthood that most adults experience and one about the unique pressures women face in our society. Personally, I love that the film leaves all this task to us instead of padding its run-time with more background and story. *We* get to do the work of unpacking the metaphor, filling in the blanks (with exception to one specific strong hint in the actual film) with our own understanding of the transition to adulthood and the pressures and constrictions it presents.
DANIEL: After the film’s closing moments my mind definitely took that route of interpreting it as a depiction of those “unique pressures women face in our society” as you put it. And indirectly then as a commentary on how that may be different for males, such as myself, and the privilege that might come making it different for a guy. I thought about that concept of the adult man-child and whether we men could afford to not shed or lock-up our inner child compared to the judgment a woman might get for doing so.
But that’s indeed what’s so beautiful about the open-ended possibilities of interpreting the core metaphor here. Viewers can take the simple story in many directions that I think both fulfill the vision of the artists involved in creating it as well as bringing the viewer’s own perspective to it all.
It’s a perfectly crafted film at just under ten minutes, taking full advantage of each moment in sight and sound to really deliver that cinematic magic appearance. Watching lots of TV and movies I sometimes can fall out of attention with things (particularly in this day and age of short attention span) even something only ten minutes long. But there’s nothing wasted here to allow your attention to take a break. You don’t want to.
SHAUN: I also wondered what this might look like if imagined from an archetypal male perspective, though I think the core of this story has a universal appeal. That sadness at the loss of childhood innocence, wonder, and even dreams is something many of us have experienced — perhaps not to such a potent degree as this film imagines (I hope). That’s part of the appeal of the film’s core metaphor: it almost encourages one to look inward to our own journey into adulthood and compare how we got there.
All that is part of why I’m glad this film never outright tells us everything. That includes Beatrice’s background (we have clues to some of it, but the rest is implied or suggested while also having a universal appeal). It also includes how we think about the underlying metaphor: Is this story purely metaphorical (inner horror) or literal (actual horror)? This is something the short film (and the short story) can do remarkably well. It leaves questions for the viewer to ponder. It leaves us with different paths of interpretation. My little English professor brain is having a field day over here!
If anyone else wants to catch this film, you can find information about it on Maid & Prince Productions. It’ll hopefully have a wider release soon! You can also find the trailer below:
