Faithful unto Death will be having its North American premiere this Saturday, May 17, at the West Newton Cinema. A Q&A with director Ivars Zviedris and editor Haralds Ozols will follow the screening. The screening is a co-presentation by the Global Cinema Film Festival and the Boston Baltic Film Festival.
A woman in rural Latvia lived 27 years with a surgeon’s tool tucked away in her abdomen following an appendectomy. The strange, fascinating, and disturbing fact fits the wild life of Mara, the woman at the center of Ivars Zviedris’s new documentary about poor and elderly pensioners in rural Latvia, Faithful unto Death. Such insanity is only a blip in her eventful life.
Mara, now 72, married four times and in each instance saw her vows through to their conclusion, “unto death.” One of her husbands met a particularly tragic end. Her current partner is the sloth-like Ivars, a man with the same personal name as the director, though they are very much different people. It’s worth mentioning since Ivars Zviedris always makes himself known in his docs. The couple doesn’t get along well — Ivars jokingly refuses to marry her for fear of ending up like her late husbands — but they also have no other options. They are dependent on each other, financially and otherwise. He needs her more than she needs him, for sure, but she also needs something to give her purpose, and complaining about him to her friend Austra does that.
Not all love stories fit into the honeymoonization of romance that capitalist culture sells us. Most love stories don’t end with the honeymoon. It’s unclear if Ivars and Mary ever went through that phase, but they certainly aren’t in it now. They bicker, bitch, and bemoan each other as often as they breathe. “I don’t need that guy anymore… He needs to taste a bit of rat medicine,” she confides in someone she trusts. It’s a line of dialogue so mundane in the world of Mara and Ivars that no lingering on the threat is necessary. Instead of a honeymoon romance, Zviedris cooks up a greasy Burger King love story: convenient, sometimes necessary, but also unhealthy and arguably even killing you. There is no nourishment in this Vidzeme.
There are no talking heads in Faithful unto Death, nor is there any music. Zviedris keeps his direction as minimal as possible. A minimalist approach to direction is always in appearance only. It is not as simple as filming reality as is. Behind every cut are hundreds of hours of footage that he chose to omit and countless other compositional options. When things get ugly between Ivars and Mara, the camera keeps rolling. Each non-choice is also a choice. That caveat aside, the observational approach allows viewers to get as close to the real Mara and Ivars as possible — the way they experience one another — by minimizing stylistic distractions.
Zviedris and his crew get close enough to the three leads that things get uncomfortable. This is nothing new for the filmmaker. His 2021 Documentarian forces ethical and philosophical questions about the distance between documentarians and their subjects while also transgressing any norms one might learn in film school about these boundaries. His approach and the uncomfortable and vulnerable distance with his subjects remind me of fellow Latvian documentarian Staņislavs Tokalovs’ Everything Will Be Alright, a film showing the similar ugly warts of his own family life. That’s a much sweeter film, though. Faithful unto Death has more bitterness to it.
Like a cup of Turkish coffee, Faithful unto Death gets more bitter at the end. Ivars, a terribly unhealthy man, as Mara reminds him several times, dies. And while talking badly about the dead is something many of our parents instruct us to avoid, bad-mouthing the deceased is a nicety that artists can’t afford to respect, and the crew behind this film makes no such attempts to hold to that. His death comes at the end of their shoot, but the film is remade in post-production. The mean and lazy husband we see die is a man constructed by the edits. Sure, there are moments of levity, humor, and even sweetness between the old couple, and that helps their relationship and the film to avoid cruelty, but it doesn’t alter the sum of the picture of the man we see die. Nor does the edit hide Mara’s emotions toward the man she lived with for a quarter of a century, the same man she threatened to end with rat poison. She wished for him dead and now he is.
Faithful unto Death
2024
dir. Ivars Zviedris
77 min.
Screens Saturday, 5/17, 4:00pm @ West Newton Cinema
North American premiere – presented by the Boston Baltic Film Festival and the Global Cinema Film Festival
Q&A with director Ivars Zviedris and editor Haralds Ozols following the screening of the film
Joshua Polanski is a freelance film and culture writer who writes regularly for the Boston Hassle and In Review Online. He has contributed to the Bay Area Reporter, Off Screen, and DMovies amongst other places. His interests include the technical elements of filmmaking & exhibition, slow & digital cinemas, cinematic sexuality, as well as Eastern and Northern European, East Asian, & Middle Eastern film.
