On the surface This Way of Life and our new film currently in post Yolanda’s Last Portrait could not be more different.
This Way of Life was filmed in the wild open of backcountry New Zealand. Yolanda’s Last Portrait was captured inside the last unrenovated house in the posh St Johns Wood district of London.
But according to Georges Polti there are only thirty-six dramatic situations. As we edit our way into the heart of the story for Yolanda it is increasingly clear that we are stuck on number 13: Enmity of Kin. In This Way of Life Peter Karena has made his life in direct opposition to his malevolent father. He is everything his father is not.
In Yolanda’s Last Portrait, Yolanda and her brother Joseph have made their lives in the shadow of the cruelty of Freda* their long dead stepmother. Her selfish behavior was legend. She buried six husbands, exiled her inconvenient 11-year-old daughter to a boarding house to care for herself alone and stole most of Yolanda and Joseph’s inheritance right down to their fathers favorite writing desk.
The double blow of losing a real mother and gaining a classic evil stepmother is evident in all Yolanda’s intense and remarkable paintings. There is that search for the purity, the wordlessness of the primal experience of connection with mother and the darkness, that flipside of all a mother can be and the damage that strikes at the deepest heart when that relationship is broken.
It is instructive to realize how our earliest relationships shape us the most. Certainly both Peter and Yolanda are living in that shadow. It’s a shadow few of us escape, no matter how successful we make our lives.
*Freda was Tom’s grandmother, her exiled daughter his mother. 