Memories of a Burning Body Review

Antonella Sundasassi Furniss’ docudrama Memories of a Burning Body explores female sexuality during a repressive era in Costa Rica. The film, which won this year’s Panorama Audience Award at the Berlin International Film Festival, takes three older women’s memories of growing up when sex was taboo and creatively presents them through the lens of one woman. We hear voice recordings of conversations between Furniss and three different women, personified by one actress onscreen. What sounds like – and initially seems – a complicated concept, creatively presents a collective female experience, or at least elements of womanhood that are universal.

One woman embodies the memories and stories of three women, and these memories take physical form, materialising in front of our protagonist like a theatre set as she wanders through her house. At the beginning of the film, the walls of her home transform into a fairground, where we see her younger self run past her older self and onto a Ferris wheel with her first love. As past and present merge, the invisible voices narrate these personal and tender moments. We later see her as a young woman getting married, and a particularly moving moment shows our older protagonist as a nurse, stroking the head of her younger self as she gives birth. Her younger self is as real and alive as the old woman she is now, standing naked and liberated in front of the bathroom mirror, and Sol Carballo plays the composite omniscient protagonist with a beautiful subtlety.

The women’s voices share defining and intimate moments from their earlier lives, such as menstruation, first sexual encounters, masturbation, and menopause. We see a group of school girls quietly giggling at an anatomy book, under the pervasive shadow of their strict Catholic upbringing. The women describe a lack of education around sex, particularly female desire and sexual pleasure, one of them announcing “I had two kids and I didn’t know what an orgasm was”.

“Being a woman is beautiful, but there is also an ugly side to it”, one of the female voices tells us, and this line effectively summarises the theme of the film. Amongst the touching and even humorous memories, the women also recollect harrowing instances of sexual abuse and domestic violence, some of which they had never told anyone. The all too familiar tales of women who were not believed or blamed for the male violence to which they were subjected, span generations, and the protagonist poignantly asks the camera “Why didn’t you listen?”

While the film explores sexual repression, it is ultimately an empowering message of female unity and strength and a celebration of female sexuality in older age. By the end of the film, it is clear that the women have a newfound zest for life, and refuse to conform to the expectations of a society that underestimates them. “I’m alive, and while I’m alive I won’t be an old lady”, one of the women tells us. The three women frankly talk about their older bodies and romantic relationships in later life, with an openness that was for so long denied them. Sexual awakenings are usually associated with youth, however Furniss powerfully depicts that one is never too old for sexual liberation.