Translations

A guy turns up at a young woman’s house unannounced. He’s a photographer who’s been travelling the world. She’s an agoraphobic shut-in cut off from everything. But they have something in common. Two things, in fact. A dead person who they both once knew, in different ways. And feelings for each other, which Evan (Alan Emrys) and Stef (Kate Morgan-Jones) are going to struggle to get into the open. That difficulty – communicating one person to another, translating emotions into words – is really what Translations is all about.

It’s a strange film unafraid to head off in its own direction. A simple two-hander for the most part about two old friends (lovers?) catching up on missing years, it withholds some of its revelations – Who is the mystery man they both knew? Will Stef and Evan get it on? Will Stef even get out of the house? – and writer/director Keith Kopp keeps these questions open for the longest time, while Evan and Stef negotiate a shared past, on her territory, which he has as good as invited himself into.

For all his globetrotting, Evan is in many ways more passive than Stef. He’s the photographer who wants to be “a mirror stood against the world”, the witness not the participant. Stef has withdrawn from life but there’s something of the medieval anchorite about her – alone in her 21st-century equivalent of the hermit’s reclusive cell, her remove from the hurly-burly has given her a clarity of vision. Stef writes poetry in an attempt to convey what she has discovered.

Poetry. Right there a huge chunk of Translations’ potential audience just fell right away. And it is that sort of film. It will find its audience, one interested in the passions of two people who have both gone a bit wrong and who are quietly, and from different ends of the situation, trying to put things right again. Maybe they will find healing in each other, that’s if they can surmount obstacles the past has put in their way. That’s another sort of translation – getting from the past to the present. The fact that Stef breaks occasionally into Welsh (the film is set in Wales) adds yet another layer.

Apart from an opening moment of Stef in a spotlight reciting some verses she has written, Kopp shoots it all in a simple black and white, almost kitchen-sink style, leaving the bulk of the work to his actors. You might have seen Emrys before if you saw that Covid horror movie Host – the one that all happened on a Zoom call. But Morgan-Jones is likely to be an unknown quantity. They work brilliantly together, fencing around each other with finesse as Stef and Evan trade memories and tentatively share hopes. The soundtrack is by French pianist Riwal and he approaches the film in much the way the actors do, weaving gentle piano fills to suggest moods and backgrounds. Most soundtracks work by reinforcement, but Riwal’s is much more about insinuation.

For such a low-key film Translations manages to be high on drama – those open questions – and it is also strangely optimistic. There is a metaphorical aspect also which Kopp doesn’t hammer, of the two sorts of people who grow up in small towns. The ones who leave and the ones who stay. Evan has decided to fill a void by going outward; Stef has opted to go inward. Each is trying to get to the future but the past remains in the way for the pair of them.

After a dozen or so shorts, which have seen some awards action, this is Kopp’s debut feature. Beneath its beguiling and gentle surface, it’s a bold one.

I am an Amazon affiliate





© Steve Morrissey 2023