Both Sides Now
Sian Heder’s film CODA is about a teenage girl who wants to be a singer, while working with her family who are deaf as their interpreter. It’s a heartwarming coming-of-ager that understands adolescence as a period of liminality – Anahit Behrooz writes on the specificity of being in two different ways at once, at a time when you’re trying to discover who you are as a whole.
Growing up, I often felt caught between two worlds, in ways that were not always obvious to me at the time. My family had left Iran shortly after the revolution to settle in London and throughout my childhood, the spaces they inhabited and those occupied by the rest of my life – my friendships, my creative ambitions – always felt resolutely unbridgeable. Life felt like a constant choice between two realities to the absolute exclusion of the other: the domestic space of my family home, with all its well-loved familiarity and limitations, or the exhilarating unknown of everything that lay beyond it. I fretted about it, my present and my shifting future. What would my someday wedding look like? Would they – my grandfather who didn’t speak much English, my parents who preferred the quiet of our close family unit – really enjoy being thrown together with my friends, a boisterous group of British-born artists and anarchists? Would my life be a series of the same moment lived over twice, to simply avoid the awkwardness of having to choose?
Sian Heder’s CODA, about a girl on the cusp of adulthood also caught between two worlds, feels in many ways achingly familiar. Following Ruby, played by Emilia Jones, a CODA (child of deaf adults) who in her last year of high school is pulled between her family’s close-knit life and the larger world beyond, CODA is a tender exploration of liminality, of the exacerbated ways in which certain teenagers experience the dizzying tipping point of coming-of-age. When I first heard of the film, which premiered at Sundance Film Festival earlier this year, I was somewhat hesitant, uncertain of its focus on a hearing teenager when so little cinematic representation of deaf children exists. Yet much like second-generation immigrant children and my own experiences of unbelonging, Ruby’s in-betweenness, her foot in both places and solid ground in neither, offers a vital reflection of the binary ways in which cultural belonging continues to be conceptualised – and the joy that can come from refusing this dichotomy, of staking your claim in both worlds at once.
When the film begins, Ruby is struggling to fit in anywhere. At school, where she rushes after finishing 3am shifts on her family’s fishing boat, other teenagers are actively hostile: they laugh at the gangster rap booming from her family car, the bass turned up loud so her father can feel the vibrations through the seat; at how, when first starting school with ASL as a first language, she unconsciously mimicked her deaf parents’ voice and tone. Ruby is always distrusting, anticipating potential unkindness. “You have no idea what it’s like to hear people laugh at your family,” Ruby snaps at a classmate. Her threshold position between hearing and deaf culture only makes her more aware of her and her family’s alterity, of the ways in which they are made to not belong.
Heder crucially extends this feeling of dislocation to Ruby’s home, where she is loved by her parents and older brother but still finds herself not fitting in. “It’s always the three of you, and then me,” she signs to her mother. Her family, oblivious, loudly carry out their chores as she attempts to do homework amidst their clattering, while her parents increasingly rely on her to communicate with doctors, coworkers, and relatives: small reminders of her demarcated place within the family dynamic. In scenes between the four of them, sound designers Paul Lucien Col and Russell Topal draw on silence and diegetic noise to play with traditional expectations of conversation: taps and swishes of hands and fingers fill the air instead of words, as the four sign fluently to each other. The percussion-like sound is broken only by Ruby, who bursts out with half-sentences when frustrated or impatient; a codeswitching that unwittingly brings the language of the outside world in.
It is only in her love for music and singing that Ruby feels at home and at first, its presence in CODA is a private sphere to which no one else – neither her deaf parents or hearing people at school – is given access. Songs play through Ruby’s headphones as she rides her bike, the melody fading out as she pulls the buds from her ears, or they pound through her family house for her and her alone. She sings with remarkable depth and clarity, her soaring voice echoing out from her family’s fishing vessel as it hugs the Massachusetts coastline, or from where she sits by the empty lake she goes to be alone. When she attempts to tell her mother about her love of singing, she is amused. “You’re a teenager. If I was blind, would you want to paint?” she asks, framing Ruby’s secret passion as nothing more than a performance of teenage independence.
The very idea of the coming-of-age story is notably rooted in liminality – in the act of becoming rather than of having become. In Rebel Without a Cause, James Dean screamed about feeling torn apart. John Hughes made a name for himself inscribing this temporal limbo onto celluloid, from his magnum opus of teenage angst The Breakfast Club to his fairy tale of high school dating and self-knowledge Pretty in Pink. More recently, Bo Burnham’s Eighth Grade placed under a microscope the sheer agony of identity formation in an increasingly performative world. And numerous other filmmakers have explored what it means to come of age when your separate worlds are in tension: Gurinder Chadha’s cult classic Bend It Like Beckham gave us Jesminder, a second-generation immigrant girl torn between her family’s traditional roots and her subversive love of football, while Sarah Gavron’s gorgeous snapshot of contemporary London life Rocks depicts a young Black girl navigating homelessness and the British care system while trying to attend school.
What makes CODA such a tender-hearted addition to the complex genre is Heder’s understanding and embrace of this instability, her reclamation of Ruby’s liminal experience as both a teenager and a CODA as a site of joy and possibility, rather than exclusion. She may not fully belong in either world, but what was once the no man’s land in-between can be made her own, a place where she can find a voice that speaks to both. We see a glimpse of it early on in the film, where her music teacher asks her, Billy Elliot-like, how she feels when she sings and, lacking the words to explain, Ruby clenches her hands against her chest and stomach before letting them float out.
It is a defiant melding of signing and singing that later culminates in the film’s denouement, as Ruby rushes to an audition at the prestigious Berklee College of Music with her family by her side. They have almost missed her slot, Ruby having decided to stay loyal to her family and help them interpret in their new business. In the audition room, overcome by nerves, her voice shakes as she attempts to sing Joni Mitchell’s inimitable folk ballad ‘Both Sides Now’ until she notices her family up in the gallery seats, having snuck in to watch. She knows they can’t hear her. And they’ve come into her world anyway.
And suddenly, Ruby’s whole body changes. Her hands creep up as she gazes at her parents, signing the words to Mitchell’s haunting exploration of life’s dualities, of the contrasting moments – “give and take”, “up and down”, “win and lose” – that can co-exist within a single experience. The signing layers over her performance as she turns music into something that is not only aural, but tangible and now visual: dissolving the boundaries between the two worlds she has been rocking uncertainly between. The fear I once felt, about having to live every moment over twice, fades away for Ruby as they finally overlap.
Heder crafts a film that celebrates being in-between, the joy and richness and creative possibility that can arise out of not belonging fully to one world or another. Introducing ‘Both Sides Now’, Joni Mitchell once said: “In this song there are only two sides to things… there’s reality, and I guess what you might call fantasy. There’s enchantment and dis-enchantment, what we’re taught to believe things are and what they really are”. At its heart, CODA is a film about complicating this dichotomy. Of understanding the binds that exist between two sides, that maybe aren’t in opposition at all.
Anahit Behrooz is an arts journalist based in Edinburgh. She currently works as events editor at The Skinny, with words in Little White Lies, The Quietus, MAP Magazine, Girls on Tops and others. She likes beautiful films about women, old bookshops, and Dan Levy’s eyebrows.