January 19th: Veils Run Thin in Drama on Love and Loss

Jake Liban Pezzack’s January 19th is a wistful 11-minute drama about the final hours of a woman’s long and well loved life. Set in an elderly care home that feels like a waiting room, the story turns the clock back to a different period of waiting: the hour before the woman’s wedding.  

For the most part it is a simply designed film, belying the depth it reaches for in its thought. Nicky (Nicky Bean) has marked the day’s date on the calendar with so many loops of red ink that one wonders at her seeming frailty. She moves through the care home with a friendless solitude, her inner life and her past richer and lovelier than the offerings of the present. In her room, she has old home videos on the TV. Specifically, it is the footage from the day of her wedding. 

The couple are in love. The red-orange hue of the footage is so much more vibrant than just sepia, brimming with a zest that the film enjoys pitting against the still blue of Nicky’s life in the care home. Young Nicky (Abi Corbett) talks and laughs and behaves so grounded in her surroundings even when it’s just a dressing room. Her groom, Noel (Oisin Nolan) adoringly holds the camera on Nicky but slips into the frame often enough to show how much the emotion is reciprocated. The narrative shifts back and forth between the present and the memory.

Titanic, that Titanic, looms heavy over the film. Nicky’s room which resembles Rose’s cabin, the calendar on the table given the same attention as the photos by Rose’s bedside, or the remains of the hero’s view of his beloved stored in a visual medium. These parallels help set the perimeters in a drama without the luxury of time. It also engages the conclusion of the predecessor to deepen and subvert it with the successor. The climax is in fact the crowning jewel of January 19th, its best moment that presents the transcendent nature of love in a haunting way. 

The present is moulded to mimic the past, bent to the will of the lover. January 19th traces the shape of love around absence within a world that inherently pales in comparison by virtue of not being that other place, one which can only be imagined.  

Watch January 19th Short Film