Life does not offer San Kyi many choices, and although she sometimes thinks about leaving Yangon and returning to her village, she knows there may be very little work waiting for her there, which means the long days she spends in a garment factory are not simply something she can walk away from whenever she has had enough. Staying does not necessarily make her happy, but leaving would hardly solve everything either, and Aung Phyoe’s Fruit Gathering begins with this very ordinary but difficult reality, following a young woman whose future is already limited by money, work and circumstance before falling in love gives her something else to worry about.
At the factory is Theint Theint Oo, played by Nandar Myint Lwin, who appears more confident and practical than the quieter San Kyi (Nandar Myat Aung), and as the two women spend more time together, sharing the same exhausting routines and gradually becoming part of each other’s everyday lives, their friendship begins to change without either of them immediately putting a name to what is happening. There is no single convenient scene in which friendship suddenly becomes romance, because their feelings develop little by little.
Aung Phyoe takes his time with their relationship, letting San Kyi and Theint simply be together before either woman has to explain what she feels, and because their growing attachment exists alongside work, exhaustion, money and all the other practical concerns of everyday life, their romance never feels separated from everything happening around them. The closer they become, the harder that outside reality is to ignore, because recognising that you love someone does not automatically mean you are free to build a life with them, especially when that person is another woman and when family, money and the basic need to keep earning a living already influence so many of the decisions you can make.
Fruit Gathering is not only interested in the fact that San Kyi and Theint are two women falling in love in a place where being together openly is difficult, because their relationship is only one part of lives already filled with other worries, most of them far more practical. This is why the garment factory matters so much to the film; it is not simply where San Kyi and Theint meet and spend their days together, but a constant reminder that neither woman has the financial freedom to make decisions based entirely on what she wants. Falling in love may make them imagine a different life, but imagining one is much easier than paying for it, especially when walking away from a job without knowing where the next one will come from could leave them with an even more difficult reality than the one they are already trying to escape.
Phyoe does not explain much of this through dialogue and he rarely needs to, because so much of San Kyi’s attraction to Theint can already be seen in Nandar Myat Aung’s face before San Kyi herself appears willing to acknowledge exactly what she is feeling. Myat Aung gives a beautiful performance without turning San Kyi’s shyness into a collection of monotonous and familiar gestures. Nandar Myint Lwin has a very different job with Theint, whose confidence can initially make her seem easier to understand, although the further the relationship develops, the clearer it becomes that appearing more assured does not necessarily give her any greater control over where it is going. The contrast between the two actresses is one of the reasons they work so well together; they enjoy each other, frustrate each other, become jealous and sometimes hurt one another, and because neither woman is expected to behave perfectly, simply because loving each other is already difficult, their relationship feels far more convincing.
Thaiddhi’s cinematography understands how much these performances depend on being able to see what the women are doing when they are not speaking, and the camera often pays as much attention to where San Kyi and Theint are standing in relation to each other as it does to their faces, noticing who is looking while the other person is occupied, how much distance exists between their bodies and what happens to that distance as their feelings become harder to ignore. The factory, their rooms and the streets of Yangon never feel like neutral scenery placed around a romance either, because these are places where other people are present, privacy is limited and San Kyi and Theint cannot always behave in the way they might if nobody else were watching, which makes the occasions when they are finally alone feel different without the film having to tell us why.
It’s interesting to see that the director is careful not to turn San Kyi and Theint into representatives of queer women who are expected to carry an enormous social message simply because of whom they love. Neither woman is required to be particularly noble simply because their relationship is difficult, and that matters enormously, because Fruit Gathering never says that love automatically frees people from the circumstances in which they live; if anything, loving somebody gives San Kyi and Theint another person whose presence can bring enormous happiness but whose loss can now hurt them just as deeply.
For a first feature, Fruit Gathering shows a real sense of when to hold back and trust its actors.
Fruit Gathering is a love story, but finding someone to love is not really the greatest difficulty San Kyi and Theint face, because wanting a life together and being able to build one are two very different things. Their feelings may be clear, yet almost everything surrounding them makes the future less certain, and the question hanging over the film is not whether they love one another enough, but whether the lives they have been given will ever make enough room for that love.
Rating:
Written by Maggie Gogler
Featured image courtesy of BFI LFF
View of the Arts is an online publication dedicated to film, music, and the arts, with a strong focus on the Asian entertainment industry. As we continue to grow, we aim to deepen our coverage of Asian music while remaining committed to exploring and celebrating creativity across the global arts landscape.
