All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt

dir: Raven Jackson

2023

Just to assert the stonkingly obvious – films are a visual medium. But what about when a film tries to convey something about the senses other than the visual and the auditory ones?

It’s considered a failure, but one of my favourite books and eventual films ever made was Perfume, a beautifully written book by Patrick Suskind, and, to me, a delightful, awe-inspiring macabre movie made by Tom Tykwer. Its great attempt, and perhaps great failure, is attempting to tell a story so centred around the human animal’s sense of smell.

For me to accept that the film is a failure means I have to accept that the book is a failure, and that I cannot do. Just because they tried to tell a story about smell in a visual form doesn’t mean they didn’t succeed. The writer and the filmmaker went to great lengths to convey what they tried to convey, and for some people they got the visceral, transporting sensation across, and for others, they didn’t.

Why in fuck’s name are you yet again talking about a different film, I hear you groan. Well, my point is, this film here All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt tries to tell, in a visual and auditory medium, being film, a story that is mostly conveyed through the sense of touch. In other words, using visuals and sound design to try to convey how something feels, both in an emotional and tactile sense. A grandmother’s hands; a sister’s shoulder; a beloved’s shoulder, a dying fish’s scales, a baby’s head, the feel of dirt in your hand; a hand swirling in water, a mother’s reproach…

That’s not easy. Movies show us what to feel. They often tell us what to feel. We often have characters or voiceovers tells us exactly how characters feel. But we rarely have actors trying to convey something about the tactile sense of how something physically felt at the time. And we almost never have entire films which are about how existence felt for a person at different times in their lives through who they touched and how.

There is no plot in this film, and the chronology jumps around continuously. There’s very little dialogue throughout, and much of the cinematography involves filming people in close up, their faces, especially their hands, their heads, their backs, and how they interact with people or with the world.

All that you have to remember, with regards to the title of the movie, is that we are, as per the many myths of creation, made of clay, earth or dirt, and water. We are nothing more. Even stardust is a smudge when it’s on the surface of this planet. Dirt and water interact in many ways, in lazy swirls, in raging dark torrents, in muddied marks, but from the earth we came, and to the earth we shall return.

This film literalises that by both having people eat earth, as well as interact with water, with life and death, in all its cyclical glory without invoking or recalling any songs by Sir Elton John. There’s life in water, water is life, but a fish taken out of water too long never breathes water again, and when our main and seemingly only character is meant to be catching fish for her family, for food, her father sternly tells her that she better not be letting them go free again.

The first scenes are of her scratching her nails across the scales of a fish that she tries to return to the water. We hear the nails on the scales; we almost feel what it felt like. Later on we see her being instructed by her mother how best to cut the head from a catfish, which she does very reluctantly.

The girl is older, younger, older, much older, young again, a child, then a mother, then a child mourning her mother, a young girl with a crush, an older women who’s been crushed, a child again, a pregnant woman, and then some girl’s auntie. A child, a woman, a child.

I have no doubt there’s a logic there, a through line, for the person who made this film, being Raven Jackson. This isn’t necessarily her story, though it deeply feels like a story she desperately wants not just to tell but for us to feel. To feel either what it was like, or what it would be like, in these moments, these stretched out moments. Scenes take time. It doesn’t feel like they’re constructed to be vignettes, or sequences. We don’t know where it began or where it will end; we often feel like we’ve dropped in to something happening ever in the middle, never at a place that would situate us to know what’s actually going on. So much happens that we have no clue about, but again, it shouldn’t matter if we feel like what it must have felt like.

When Mack, at a certain age, reunites with someone, we don’t know when it is, we don’t know why they separated, we watch as they hug, and as they both cry, and strain against each other (this might be a reunion, but we sense it can’t last very long for whatever reasons), they are unstuck in time even as we know it can’t go on much longer. Why are they longing for each other? Why can’t they be together?

We’ll never know, though we might have inklings. We are observing some people, a person, so closely throughout her life, with no distance or perspective of our own, and all we know is that she has these fierce bonds with people. And there’s always the rain, the river, the dirt to rely on.

What a striking figure her mother cuts in this film! Sheila Atim as the mum is a presence, a definite presence, and her absence is felt by her daughters, and the audience, when she becomes unstuck in time (dies). I can’t claim to know much about the actor other than that she is actually from Britain, (well, Uganda originally), and she played a wonderfully ferocious Agojie warrior in The Warrior Queen a couple of years ago. And you don’t forget Sheila Atim after you’ve seen her, though of course her scenes rocking a child to keep her asleep are even more compelling that watching her impale slavers and cut off men’s heads in the other flick.

That scene where Mack’s parents are dancing… young Mack looks on with what, joy? Envy? The satisfaction of knowing her parents love each other?

And then later (how hard it is to situate anything in time in this flick), to find her unmoving mother near the water during a storm…

And then to be bathing in a bath, heavily pregnant, but in water again, only to have the scene in the bath be of her mother bathing Mack as a baby…

There are ways to describe this kind of filmmaking, or storytelling. They feel inadequate to the task. I’ve seen terms used to describe this film like “experimental” or “lyrical” or “elliptical”. I don’t think they really capture how it is to watch it. It’s compelling and engrossing, and sometimes distancing and confusing. Some scenes are so long you wonder if something else is going to happen, maybe something random, but as loose as it feels, it’s so tightly controlled.

‘Experimental’ is less a descriptive term and more a threat, these days, and I don’t think it conveys how fully realised the film is. I also think ‘experimental’ is often code for “really annoying’, and we have to make allowances for it. I don’t think that’s the case here, or at least that’s not what it felt like. It was, for me, enjoyable because I was in the right mood, and the right place, in my mind. In a different mood, perhaps an impatient one, I probably would have found it to be torture.

It’s such an accomplished film, so rare, and so ephemeral. Dare I say it has the expanse, the meditative aspects of a Terrence Malick flick without the pretentiousness or the constant voiceover. This has no voiceover at all, it would be insane to have voiceover in this flick, precious and perfectly constructed as it is.

But it’s still a mystery. It may be illuminating, but its secrets it keeps, close to its chest.

8 times stop licking dirt roads unless you want to get sick again out of 10

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“You want to know a secret? It doesn't end or begin. Just changes form.” - All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt