Acts of kindness are rare in Myanmar’s harsh textile factories. There, young San Chi (Nandal Myat Aung) bends over a sewing machine, eking out a meager living. When new employee Taint (Nandar Min Lwin) tells a white lie to protect her after taking an unauthorized bathroom break, Mr. Sang Chi’s face lights up with gratitude, but Mr. Taint just winks. In this simple moment of unity between strangers, intimate friendships are forged. But in Aung Pyoye’s trembling, suggestive drama, “Fruit Gathering,” something even more provocative happens to the women’s anxieties and social boundaries, while an implicit thread of queerness permeates the proceedings long before a single reckless kiss forces the characters to deal with it.
Dispatches from Myanmar, where same-sex sex remains illegal, remain rare in global cinema, but the graphic and unusual nature of that environment distinguishes Fruit Gathering from other comparable films about gay oppression and self-actualization. In many ways, this movie is painfully outdated. If the film seems cautious or tentative in some ways, it’s a sharp reminder of the ongoing fight for queer visibility in many parts of the world. Co-produced with France and the Czech Republic, Fie’s first full-length feature (following a series of well-received short films, including 2019’s Locarno Competition entry ‘Cobalt Blue’), which premiered in competition at Karlovy Vary, should enjoy extensive festival travel, with a particularly LGBTQ-specific showcase.
Aung is an effectively vulnerable, soft-spoken presence as Sang Kyi, a young woman accustomed to keeping a low profile. Beaten at work by her boss and at home by her critical and domineering mother (Tidus So Canto), she has been taught to only want the bare minimum in life. This factory on the outskirts of an industrial zone in Yangon, Myanmar’s commercial capital, offers just that. She quietly longs to return to her native village in the northern countryside, frequently dreaming of the rustic times there and the mangoes hanging profusely from the trees (in a stylized sequence filmed to evoke the early Technicolor process). However, her stubbornly emotionless mother sees only work in the city and a lucrative marriage in her future.
In the more rebellious and free-spirited Taint, Sang Chi not only glimpses who she could be, but also who she could be with, and the two women form a fast and strong bond. One day, when they went to the riverside together, Taint took a photo of their shadows reflected in the rippling water. That snapshot remains in my memory as a symbol of the identities of two people who suddenly and violently merged. However, while Sang Chi idealizes the other woman, Taint is flawed and unstable, quick to borrow money from new friends and slow to pay back. After a short, unexplained disappearance, she returns with a new husband, leaving Sang Chi confused and disappointed. At this point, the romantic nature of Sang Chi’s feelings for Taint are finally confirmed. But whether they pay off remains a thorny point of ambiguity.
“Fruit Gathering” is at its most artistic and most moving in its questioning of the conditions of this relationship through the gaze and gestures of a silent pregnant woman. Shot with dreamlike serenity in the summer light, the film is entirely unscored by cinematographer Taiddi. A video of one woman staring quizzically into the mirror while another combs her hair. The pastel matching of Akali Diraki’s beautifully tailored outfits is subtly enhanced. The outwardly platonic but internally important meaning of holding hands in public. Any further eroticism is mostly hidden off-screen, but such scenes crackle with sensual potential.
Our position becomes more precarious as tensions between the women blossom into a confrontational melodrama with heated, hasty outbursts and physical violence. The cramped desperation of Aoun’s words here rings true, as a woman forced to speak out for the first time about her feelings without being heard or recognized at all, but while the new sharp deviations in Fie’s writing do not apply, the film steadies toward a moving coda that returns to its preferred mode of implicit, bittersweet longing shaped and suppressed by harsh socio-economic realities. In a story about love that is forbidden in the most literal and systematic sense, the stakes are consistently and palpably high, and the brief moments of ecstasy feel liberated.
