The art of no resolutions

This makes them intensely humane, which is to say, they created a deep acceptance of human-ness as I watched—my own and that of others

Marching into the new year armed with shiny-eyed resolutions and Vitamin C for the hangover? Maybe I’m not the character you want to run into today.

I’m so allergic to the muesli jaisa wholesome enterprise of resolutions, I spent the holidays watching films which eschewed resolutions. In Martin McDonagh’s The Banshees of Inisherin, a man one day informs his best friend, “I just don’t like you no more.” He feels contempt for his friend’s ordinary niceness as he chases posthumous greatness to offset existential despair. Uncompromisingly painful—though funny and fleet-footed—the film offers no redemption. Ang Lee’s Lust, Caution, outwardly an espionage drama, is suffused with melancholy, loneliness and sexual intensity. It goes to a near-unbearable edge of intimacy, laced with the same dangers of betrayal as espionage, its conclusion both final, and not. Park Chan Wook’s Decision to Leave parallels love’s erotic intentness with the incessant uncovering of detective work, filling the air with uncertainty and unresolved outcomes. Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s Drive My Car, a little more redemptive, suggests no easy way out of grief except to drive down its long, new road in an old car—because what have we got but our old self, no matter how new the year?

But these stories do not make us hopeless in our own sadness. On the contrary, by mirroring life’s difficulties, by acknowledging pain and human loneliness and our yearning for connection, most of all by not selling glib remedies of resilience, they witness without moral lessons, and with a munificent beauty, the best and worst of being human. This makes them intensely humane, which is to say, they created a deep acceptance of human-ness as I watched—my own and that of others.

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As 2022 closed, I asked friends what they had learned last year. One said she had learned not to take things personally. Another, “I learned to talk to my mother loudly without sounding angry.” A third learned “that we don’t trust contentment.” Another, “love after letting go.” One learned not to panic about getting everything done because the world wouldn’t end even if she did not. One declared she wasn’t sure her (alleged) toxic positivity was that toxic. Someone learned she didn’t need to mother her colleagues and someone that it’s hard to taste worldy success, while feeling what’s special about you remains unseeen or perhaps unshown. One friend felt he’d learned nothing, as he did not have the guts to implement his learnings. Each person’s message trailed a story, an ongoing movie not quite resolved. Their wistfulness, humour, eye-rolls, battle-scarred quietude, their self-awareness and self-acceptance felt very sustaining. (I didn’t get to ask Elon Musk and Andrew Tate but I guess they learned a lesson).

Resolutions are set up as hope. But they also seem to imply an erasure of mistakes and difficulty. In a time of constant pressure to see ourselves as fault-less products, “living our best life”, always ready with a hot take for social media, politically correct and “setting goals”, judging or being judged, here’s to celebrating flawed but ongoing journeys, unresolved but constant political striving, humility in the face of hardship, trust in ourselves and others—a pause to mark the passage of time, before we take our old selves into a new year, walking imperfectly towards joy.

Paromita Vohra is an award-winning Mumbai-based filmmaker, writer and curator working with fiction and non-fiction. Reach her at paromita.vohra@mid-day.com

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