“The Taste of Mango” Savors Ambiguity

The Taste of Mango (Chloe Abrahams, 2023) 3½ out of 5 stars

Tammy Wynette’s famous 1968 song “Stand by Your Man” was released in 1968 at a time of growing feminist consciousness and became both immediately popular and mired in some controversy about the significance of its lyrics. In her second verse, Wynette sings, “But if you love him you’ll forgive him/Even though he’s hard to understand/And if you love him, oh be proud of him/’Cause after all he’s just a man.” Laudable sentiments, for sure, as long as we’re talking about basic human frailties and imperfections. However, if said man is an abuser, it’s probably best to throw him over.

That theme—and the melody, itself—play a role in The Taste of Mango, the debut documentary feature from filmmaker Chloe Abrahams. The movie follows three generations of women in a Sri Lankan family, two of whose members now live in the United States. There’s grandma Nana, the eldest; then Rozanna in the middle; and finally Chloe, the youngest. They have the usual mixture of love and disagreement found in most flesh-and-blood relationships, complicated by one significant detail. Nana’s husband of many years once raped Rozanna. The fact that Nana remains married to him is a source of ongoing tension.

And yet Rozanna has never cut off contact with her mother (though she refuses to see her step-father). She appears content with life in America and is about to marry her longtime boyfriend, Geoff (not Chloe’s father). Nana comes for a visit, and Rozanna exhorts her, as always, to leave the damn man and stop standing by him. He’s spent time in prison for raping others—including children—yet Nana can’t seem to break things off. They talk about it a lot, and then Nana heads back to Sri Lanka.

All the time, Rozanna and Chloe interact frequently without Nana around, Rozanna listening to her favorite country music (including Wynette, whose anthem plays at intervals) and preparing to wed Geoff. At one point, Chloe confesses to the camera that she, too, was raped as a teen. Such wounds run deep, and healing is difficult.

The Taste of Mango is powerful in its examination of the tension between acceptance, forgiveness, and recovery. As a director, Abrahams leans into abstract imagery and blurry shots that sometimes don’t resolve, a strong visual metaphor for the complexities of real life. It’s easy to judge when people don’t act as we think they should, but they have their own truth and it may take time.

The repeated cuts to water, in all its forms, remind us of the temporal flow of the universe. Sometimes the effect is too ambiguous. As beautiful as the montage of various metaphysical attractions may be, elliptical storytelling has its limitations. It’s on the fringes of those boundaries that the weight of meaning lies, and where The Taste of Mango proves most cinematically nourishing.

Christopher Llewellyn Reed

Christopher Llewellyn Reed is a film critic, filmmaker, and educator, as well as Film Festival Today's Editor. A member of both the Online Film Critics Society (OFCS) and the Washington DC Area Film Critics Association (WAFCA), and a Rotten Tomatoes-approved film critic, Chris is, in addition, lead film critic at Hammer to Nail and the author of Film Editing: Theory and Practice.