Walter, Esther, and Sylvia are father, mother, and daughter. Farewell Amor is about their reunion seventeen years after Walter (Ntare Mwine) decided to improve their lives and leave Angola for New York City, where Esther (Zainab Jah) and Sylvia (Jayme Lawson) come to join him. A whirlwind of feelings ensues upon their reencounter: nervous excitement, debilitating estrangement, and unanticipated resentment. How can unconditional love be reconciled with the abyssal feeling of disillusionment? Can two paths that have diverged meet again at their long-intended destination? And what mechanisms help cope with insurmountable longing and heartache? Ekwa Msangi seeks an answer to such questions in her gripping and beautifully directed debut feature film.
Farewell Amor unfolds in a tripartite fashion. Once the basic contextual and emotional coordinates are sketched out in the opening scenes at the airport and flat, the film splits into three parts focussed on each character’s story over a roughly common time frame. As their individual troubles and differing perspectives gradually come to the fore (their contrast played up by the shifting camera angles), the progressively omniscient viewer starts to warm up to each lead character. Initially, the viewer might side with Walter, who is put off by his wife’s newfound religiousness and his daughter’s reluctance to open up. When his wife pushes him to go to church rather than spend Sunday out of town or condemns Walter for drinking, in his words, “just a simple wine,” we join him in wondering whether it had been worth sacrificing his freedom – in particular, putting a halt to the life he had been secretly sharing with Linda (Nana Mensah). Soon, though, we learn about Esther and Sylvia’s own connections and about the sacrifices they, too, have had to make. The reasons behind what had at first seemed like abstruse sentiments and mysterious glances slowly come to light through Msangi’s engrossing form of storytelling.
Dance is of central importance to Farewell Amor. On the one hand, music and dance are key binding elements for many African diasporas. Walter dances Kizomba, admitting that it is through dance that he gets to be himself in a country where being a Black foreigner is very difficult. Sylvia herself loves Kuduro with all her heart, and her participation in a dance competition, unapproved by her mother, provides the plot line for her development and opening up to her father. On the other hand, dance serves as an important metaphor for the family’s relationship. Dancing is about becoming synchronised with music and the people around you: you need to be on the same level as your dance partner, both establishing a mutual connection and feeling free with yourself. With this idea constantly in focus, Farewell Amor explores how trust is lost and regained, how the lies we tell ourselves assure our survival, and how personal crises are corporeally and psychically materialised. All of these tensions are, of course, antithetical to the wordless, intimate flow of dance. Walter remembers better times with Esther: “Words meant nothing. So, we danced.” But dancing falls short as a metaphor, as no connection is ever perfect and expectations are never fully requited. In their own unique ways, Walter, Esther, and Sylvia begin to accept this predicament; and as they learn to love each other again, they also encounter the limits of their own freedom.
This premise was first rehearsed in the form of a short film released in 2016. Though the basis is the same, the ten-minute Farewell Meu Amor focusses rather on the end of Walter and Linda’s relationship, underscoring the anguish that agitates Walter before the reunion with his family (in one of the laconic scenes, he struggles to practise a welcome-home smile in the mirror). Interestingly, the title includes the possessive meu (my) before amor (love), locating the idea of “parting with love,” which is multidimensionally central to the feature film, in his ending relationship with Linda, who only plays a minor role in the 2020 picture.
The focus of the 2020 film is on the characters’ emotional development and on the performative aspects of relationships and family life. Though Farewell Amor steers away from explicitly political narratives about immigration, Msangi touches with impressive sensibility on delicate topics such as religious fanaticism and the decolonisation wars that displaced many from Africa throughout the twentieth century. The close-up shots of intimately lighted faces really highlight the nuances of their emotions and the suffered words they utter. And when this intimacy threatens to make the film overly intense, side characters, such as the free-spirited neighbour, enter to provide relief from the general melancholy. Overall, Farewell Amor is a persuasive cinematic lesson on the conflicting need for both love and freedom and on human beings’ never-ending choreography to synchronise their feelings.
