At a certain point in “Yo (Love is a Rebellious Bird),” Anna Fitch can be seen building a miniature cathedral in a much larger one she’s constructing cinematically for her friend Yo, who being almost 50 years older than her is inevitably going to pass away a lot sooner in her life that she would like and preparations for that moment have involved a precise, small-scale replica of Yo’s house that isn’t a whole lot bigger, tucked into a sunny neighborhood near Monterey Bay where standing between two regular-sized houses appears from the street to be an enchanted cottage buffered by trees. Fitch recalls the magic she felt there after first meeting the nearly 90-year old Yo 16 years earlier, describing their initial encounter at a local rummage sale as being able to feel “her gaze run up my arm” and as the filmmaker reconstitutes pictures of Yo from her teens in stained glass windows, there is in fact something sacred she’s attempting to pay tribute to.
The ordinary is often elevated to the extraordinary in Fitch and co-director Banker White’s exuberant and wildly creative portrait of the octogenarian who leads a quiet existence, largely confined to her house in her golden years, yet like a visit to a neighbor whose history is far more complex than could ever be imagined, opening the door can feel like globetrotting. In Yo’s case, it really does transport Fitch to Vienna where her friend had a difficult youth, frustrating her family and guidance counselors when she showed no interest in the typical things that were expected of girls her age such as sewing or becoming a beautician – she can remember a particularly aghast response at saying she had no affinity for children, though she’d come to have four of them. A picture starts to emerge of being constantly out of place in a patriarchal society, from Yo being sent to a boarding school after she stopped speaking to her father who knowingly triggered her acute fear of chickens to her first husband attempting suicide immediately upon hearing she wanted to leave him, making it look like she’s sitting pretty when she’s by herself, having a home of her own.
At times, the razzle dazzle of Fitch and White’s approach, which doesn’t only involve miniatures and an eerily lifelike puppet of Yo to recreate past scenes from her life, but also drifts away from a strict chronology both in the present tense and the past as the film is set up in its subject’s memory, can make some details frustratingly hazy as Yo appears to have led three very different lives – first with a strict Swiss upbringing, a second wild child existence once she moved to the California coast in the late 1960s and a third as she settled into the contentment of old age – and while her children make cameos, some large pieces of the puzzle seem to have been excluded to keep the film at a brisk 78 minutes long. However, when the film is ultimately an expression of Fitch’s grief and how their friendship emboldened her, the comparison of their lives becomes a far more interesting story as Fitch is at the start of the moment where Yo really could start deciding for herself what kind of life she’d like to have, even when recently having a child locks her into at least some specific trajectory.
Fitch doesn’t at all make the film about herself save for a short introductory salvo describing how unlikely the friendship was given their different backgrounds (Fitch’s studies in entomology later come into play in an interesting way as colorful bugs make their way into the picture). Yet her admiration for Yo living life on her own terms becomes a radiant part of the film, particularly when it may not be something she’s even entirely conscious of as she starts to place items in the miniature home of Yo that are longer artifacts she saw directly, but additions that could be construed as a foundation she gained from her friend to build something new atop of. Of course, “Yo (Love is a Rebellious Bird)” acts as a spirited elegy when it ends up committing Yo’s final days to celluloid, but she isn’t ever seen as a part of the past with her ongoing vitality as an eternal presence in Fitch’s life reflected in the constantly invention on display in recreating scenes from her life and when that influence is unlikely to ever end, the fact that the film can feel slightly incomplete seems just about perfect.
“Yo (Love is a Rebellious Bird)” will screen at DC/Dox on June 14th at 7:30 pm at Regal Gallery Place.