Film review: Asia's quietly devastating story of a teen and her mother is Vancouver Jewish Film Festival standout
Alena Yiv gives a nuanced performance of a woman tentatively stepping into a maternal role
The Vancouver Jewish Film Festival streams Asia from March 4 to 14
ASIA, THE DEBUT film by writer-director by Ruth Pribar that has been sweeping the Israeli award circuit, doesn’t so much rip your heart out as slowly wring it dry.
A quietly devastating character study of a young mother losing her teenage daughter to a degenerative motor disease, it eschews sentimentality in favour of a sparse and agonizing realism.
As the titular Asia, Russian-born Israeli actor Alena Yiv gives a nuanced performance of a woman tentatively stepping into a maternal role that has so far eluded her. Shira Haas, as her daughter Vika, brings an unflinching calm to her role as a girl confronting her budding teenage desires, even as her body is failing her.
An immigrant working in Jerusalem, Asia’s days are spent in her job as a geriatric nurse (and a rather good one, at that), and her nights out in bars, or having furtive sex with a married doctor. Her interactions with Vika are stilted and mechanical, with the pair seemingly sharing nothing of their daily lives. While Asia spends her days washing old bodies and her nights seducing bartenders, Vika hangs out with her friend at the local skate park. Their worlds begin to overlap, however, when Vika ends up in the hospital after drinking alcohol, which reacts with her daily medications.
Things slowly, but relentlessly, accelerate from there. When Vika is given a poor prognosis on her unnamed illness, Asia begins to take tentative steps to close the gap with her daughter. At first, they connect more like sisters, chatting about boys and even hanging out at a bar. But as Vika’s body weakens, her fingers turning in on themselves and her walk becoming shuffled, Asia’s ministrations become more instinctively maternal, if sometimes questionable.
Vika, in turn, unfolds softly into her mother’s care. “Mama,” she says, when Asia checks in on her by phone, and we realize this may be the first time she has ever called her that. “I’m fine,” she insists, echoing the answer Asia gives to everyone whenever they ask how she is doing. They are a stoic pair.
It is not until the closing scene that their need for one another is laid bare, and acknowledged. And it’s here, in her final, defining act as a mother, that Asia takes your breath away.
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