52 Films by Women Vol 8. 2. Earth Mama (Director: Savanah Leaf)

 

Still courtesy of We Are Parable (UK) / A24 Films (US)

Earth Mama, the feature debut of (now) twenty-nine-year-old British 2012 Olympian turned director Savanah Leaf, depicts the heartbreak faced by a young heavily pregnant African American woman, Gia (rapper Tia Nomore), who is separated from her two children on account of her past drug use and who may not be able to keep the child she is about to give birth to. It is about women whose lives are governed by bureaucracy – safeguarding, we now call it – where the rights of children are placed above their mothers. Gia faces numerous obstacles – her limited income, the mandated courses she must attend, and the withheld affection of her young daughter. Her friends just about sustain her – one of them gives her free meals – but it isn’t much of a life.

As a baby scan tells us, the film is set in 2006, though not for any explicit reason. We can speculate that women’s rights were restricted under George W. Bush, but Republicanism is never mentioned. Gia is situated in an environment where women account for themselves to other women and the men who helped put them in a vulnerable position are nowhere to be seen. Or rather they are in their own little huddles driving vehicles into dust. Men aren’t part of the solution, nor are they asked to be. This is a film that posits a pragmatic approach to gender politics: don’t rely on a man to do anything but take what he wants and skedaddle. Men don’t step up, they step out.

Earth Mama isn’t, on the face of it, an empowering portrait of African Americans, though it does have its grace note. Gia is part of a problem set. Leaf opens her film with a second woman talking to camera, or rather, the mothers’ group. Don’t judge me for my choices, says the speaker in summary. You haven’t had my experiences. Gia tests our sympathy, expressing her frustration to an official at her limited contact with her children, who have been placed into foster care. I won’t have that attitude in my office, the white official snaps back. Gia hasn’t completed her application for housing and doesn’t earn enough to allow her to bring up three children. If she didn’t have so many classes, she could earn more. We empathise, though anger doesn’t invite allies.

Gia’s fortune is literally counted down by her diminishing phone credit – an effective device – as she struggles to win back the affection of her son Trey (Ca’Ron Coleman) and daughter Shaynah (Alexis Rivas), the former by buying him sensory rings. Later in the film, Trey calls his mother to ask to pick him up; the suggestion is that he has heightened sensitivity. This is borne out by a scene in which Trey hugs his mother in excessive desperation, Gia pleading with the visit supervisor that he doesn’t want her to leave. The film’s other heavy-handed touch is to have Gia work in a photography studio, where the familial perfection of the customers, who can control how people see them, at least in a photograph, contrasts sharply with the pre-judgment extended towards Gia. The scene that introduces the photographic studio is a striking one, in which a baby, initially shown in close up, burbles in a basket as it is position for aesthetically pleasing effect. The camera pulls back to reveal Gia ensuring that the baby is not obscured as well as the photographer’s camera, placed a few feet away. Significantly, the camera has no one behind it. No one is judging the child.

Still courtesy of We Are Parable (UK) / A24 Films (US)

In the majority of the film, Leaf keeps Gia sharply in focus. In one scene, filmed in medium close up, that causes the audience to draw its breath, Gia steals some nappies from the bottom of another mother’s pram. We hear an off-screen voice call to her, ‘excuse me’, as Gia speedwalks to her car and drives away sharply. We know why Gia does this. In an earlier scene, her credit card is declined, and she desperately wants to keep her baby. Leaf makes it clear through another metaphor – being unable to assemble a newly purchased cot – that Gia is singly incapable of doing so. First Gia has to borrow a screwdriver, then fails to affix one panel to another. One of her friends is later shown successfully putting it together.

There is another visual metaphor as well, Gia removing the umbilical cord clip that rests (nonsensically) on her pregnant belly. Gia then pulls at the cord as if it were a loose thread; she literally unravels herself.

Gia does have a support network, Mel (Keta Price), a religious friend who believes in Gia’s natural right to be a mother and another pregnant woman, Trina (Doechii), who is more militant and who sees Gia as a kindred spirit. When Trina criticises Gia it is because she interprets her behaviour as a personal betrayal. This takes the form, under the nudging of social worker Carmen (Erika Alexander), of considering putting her new-born baby up for adoption. This represents a form of defeat but also an opportunity; the baby will not know what it is like to be separated from its birth mother, unlike Trey and Shaynah. After showing Gia a brochure with rather too many white families for comfort, Gia meets with a black family, Paul (Bokeem Woodbine), Monica (Sharon Duncan-Brewster) and their daughter, Amber (Kamaya Jones) who seem nice enough, though the gulf between their circumstances and Gia’s – the casual way they eat food, which assumes an almost obscene quality and the two small teddy bears they present as gifts for Trey and Shaynah – disturbs both Gia and ourselves.

The film doesn’t just land its points through visual metaphor, it does so through short scenes, notably one where Gia asks her boss for an advance of $100 to buy her children clothes. His severe unchanging expression doesn’t require further elaboration. Gia has a genuine crisis of confidence when Monica attends Gia’s baby scan. Leaf lingers on the ultrasound image of the baby prompting us to notice the umbilical cord that binds Gia to it. The image practically throbs to the baby’s heartbeat. Gia battles with her instincts and, perhaps predictably, succumbs. We see her getting into a car with men, which up until that point is very un-Gia-like behaviour.

The fall from grace illustrates the film’s weakness. There are few places that the drama can go. Gia becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy and takes the decision whether to keep the baby out of her own hands. Arguably, that’s what she needed to do to arrive at a point at which she could blame external circumstances, even Carmen herself, on her behaviour. Carmen gives her no such let off.

Leaf continues to push her points visually in a way that is commendable for a first-time feature film director. Gia’s lactation, ruining her blouse, betrays her. The scene in which Gia runs naked and heavily pregnant through a forest pushes the bounds of dramatic necessity. Far more subtle is a scene in which Gia is caught in traffic, removes her top layer of clothing, and hangs it out of the car window, almost to shade herself. The meaning of this image is perhaps a little too subtle. We wonder whether she will lose that top.

Earth Mama deals very effectively with a difficult subject – the rights of a mother over the rights of their child – and reaches a point where Gia projects herself in front of a judge, without betraying herself or being confrontational. Leaf based her feature on a documentary she co-directed with the actress Taylor Russell, The Heart Still Hums.

Given that Leaf had an athletic career before turning to filmmaking, her achievement is all the more remarkable. Her film is tough and visually confident. The performances are convincing none more than Nomore, who wore a prosthetic belly throughout, but had me fooled entirely.

 

Reviewed at Stockholm International Film Festival, Friday 17 November 2023, Sture Cinema, Screen Three