French writer/filmmaker Laetitia Colombani ahead of the Canadian release of the film adaptation of her bestselling novel The Braid, in Toronto on Jan. 15.Galit Rodan/The Globe and Mail
On its surface, the new drama The Braid is as literal as can be. It plaits together the story of three disparate women via hair: Smita (Mia Maelzer), a Dalit – the lowest caste in India, formerly known as the “untouchables” – who donates her hair at a temple; Giulia (Fotini Peluso), who runs a family business in Puglia, Italy, preparing natural hair for wigs; and Sarah (Kim Raver), a hard-charging Montreal lawyer who needs a wig after chemo. But on a deeper level, it’s about the invisible connection among women whose everyday heroism goes unseen. (It’s a braid of international financing, too, a Canada/French/Belgium/Italy co-production. It opens in select Canadian cities Jan. 19.)
The Braid’s writer/director, Laetitia Colombani, working from her bestselling novel of the same name, uses distinct elements and colours to represent each woman. For Smita, who cleans latrines in her northern village and undertakes a harrowing journey to free her young daughter from the same fate, it’s earth and mud, umber and ochre. For Giulia, who struggles to keep her workshop afloat amid her father’s debts, it’s sunshine and water, yellow and blue. And for Sarah, a divorced mother of three so desperate to seem invincible and to rise at her firm that she hides her breast cancer from everyone, it’s ice and glass, grey and metallic.
Ah, we chilly Canadians, trapped in our urban tower-boxes. Colombani, 47, is French, but her father, an engineer, once lived in Montreal. She chose that city for Sarah’s strand because “for me it’s a link between Europe and North America,” she said during a trip to Toronto this week. “I can feel the interplay of cultures, and languages of course, and Sarah is also torn,” between motherhood and career.
“I wanted glass everywhere, and mirrors everywhere,” Colombani continues. “Sarah is all about what she conceals and what she shows instead. She’s lying all the time. The mirrors represent her duplicity, what she sees in herself and what she doesn’t want people to see.”
Colombani, who studied cinematography, began her career as an actress, then wrote and directed two short films, followed by two features: one starring Audrey Tautou, the other Catherine Deneuve. An avid traveller – India, China, Argentina, Africa, Canada – she strikes up conversations with women wherever she goes, and she’s “always shocked by the huge challenges they face in their daily lives. The visible and invisible discrimination, in both the domestic and professional world. So much violence – physical, psychological and social violence.” In 2016 she began writing The Braid (her first novel; she’s since written two more), “focused on the idea that my daughter, who was six at the time, needed to grow up in a better world for women.”
Each character deals with some type of discrimination: caste in India, race in Italy and in Canada, “invisible discrimination,” Colombani says. “Sarah apparently has it all – a beautiful house, a great job in the best law firm, three wonderful kids, and everyone can be jealous of what she achieved. But inside, she is hiding so much.
“Women have to hide everything. You can’t say in the middle of a work meeting, ‘My child is sick,’ you have to say, ‘I need to meet a client.’ Women need to wear a mask. A perfect mask, the most smiling mask.” She quotes something she read online: “We ask a woman to work as if she has no kids, to raise her kids as if she has no work, and to look as if she has no kids and no work.”
“Really it’s a lot,” she adds. “And if anything is wrong, it’s our fault.”
Obviously, Colombani hit a nerve: Published in 2017, The Braid sold five million copies in 40 languages. Multiple producers wanted the film rights, but she insisted on writing the script (with a collaborator, Sarah Kaminsky). “I wanted it to be very faithful, to not deceive the readers who were so enthusiastic,” she says. She was less certain about directing it – until she phoned her mother, a librarian.
“She’s my oldest fan; she has read everything I’ve written since I was a child,” Colombani says. “She told me, ‘Oh yes, you’re going to make this.’ I said, ‘Mom, it’s too big.’ She said, ‘No.’ It was not a discussion, it was an order. I was so scared. But I was excited, too, because I knew I wouldn’t often have the opportunity to direct such a project.”
She shot for six months entirely on location, beginning in India, in a tiny Dalit village in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh, using only local extras. Her crew of 200 “shot in a real train station, on a real train, at a real temple,” she says. “We were in the crowds with cameras on our shoulders, noises everywhere. We needed to improvise all the time, because in India you never get what you expect.” The Dalit community welcomed them wholeheartedly: “They were so proud we chose their village. It was their first time on screen, so sometimes they were looking into the camera. But it wasn’t a problem for me; I wanted the reality. It was an intense experience, not just as a director but as a human being.”
Italy posed the opposite problem: Puglia was so postcard-pretty, Colombani asked the director of photography to shoot only the characters in action. “I needed to film their emotions, not the setting.” In France last September, she published Le voyage de la Tresse, a book about her ups and downs making the film, illustrated with 200 photos.
“I do believe in the solidarity of women, this great web of souls,” Colombani says. “My three actresses never met before the premiere in Paris two months ago, and now we’re like sisters. I need that link among women daily in my life, to inspire me as a human being and as an artist. All three of my novels are talking about this sorority.” She hopes her film creates “more justice and more respect for women, and maybe more sweetness toward them.”
For Sajda Pathan, who plays Smita’s daughter, Lalita, The Braid was literally life-changing. “Sajda was Dalit, living in the street, begging for food,” Colombani recalls. “She had no shoes, she’d never been to school, she didn’t know how to read or write. We met her at a charity organization where she would come for a meal. She was so small, eight years old, so thin, but she had these huge eyes, this intense look, this bright smile. She was living on the street and yet full of light and joy. We’d seen hundreds of girls, but she auditioned and was completely amazing.”
The director committed to finding permanent shelter and schooling for Sajda, “and now she can read and write in Hindi, she has such good marks, she eats enough, she sleeps in a real bed. I call her every month.” Two weeks ago, Sajda called her – and spoke in English. “She said, ‘Next time you come to India I will speak to you with no translator,’” Colombani says, beaming. “It’s one of the most powerful experiences of my life. We will stay linked.” As are we all.
Special to The Globe and Mail
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