God, Please Send A Whale (2024) ‘CPH: DOX’ Movie Review

Julie Bezerra Madsen’s film “God, Please Send A Whale” is a portrait of mourning. It captures when mourning has been deferred, and the emotional churn that comes with a lack of closure takes over. Through this film, she is grappling with the loss of her mother, who passed away six years earlier while visiting her sister, Ursula, in Brazil. The sisters have had severely different relationships with their mother. Ursula frequently clashed with her mother, whereas Julie had a more temperate one. However, Julie insists later to her father she could barely talk to her mother about anything important, which she just brushed away. It was mostly about bingo and boyfriends, she muses.

The three’s manner of grieving is individual and different. Julie’s father reminds her that his grief doesn’t have the similar depth that she has of a child who has lost her mother. After all, he had already been long separated from their mother. However, Julie is desperate and firm to bring both her sister and father along the same lines. She asserts the restorative importance of collective grieving. With them, she desires to try and do things she wishes she had done with her mother. Maybe it would offer a form of solace. She suggests a ceremony they could have. Her appeal of sharing grief is insistent as she struggles to reconnect with her sister.

They don’t reject her outright but register their discomfort and hesitation. The three have had deeply varied memories and experiences of being around her, whose absence has had a profound effect on their lives. Julie takes us on a tour through her family history, albeit not in great detail, a decision that works to arguably differing ends. Her sister, who was six years older than her, never got to know her own father, but the new guy, whom her mother started going out with when they moved from Brazil to Denmark, took to her as if she were his own child. He quickly earned the right by which she regarded him as her own father, her often being more comfortable and easier around him than her mother.

God, Please Send A Whale (2024) ‘CPH: DOX’ Movie Review — A still from “God, Please Send A Whale” (2024)

Although the relationship between the two girls’ mother and their father eventually broke up, his concern and affection for his daughters remained as unshakable as ever. Ursula, who later concedes with amusement that she wasn’t an easy child, yearned for Brazil so much so that she chose to build her life in it instead of Denmark, where she’d otherwise have a lot of security in the reassuring presence of her family.

Her decision to opt for such a life, where she sold jewelry on the streets with her boyfriend and somehow scraped by a living, never sat right with her mother. Ursula fiercely values her independence and ensures no one can quite push her into doing things against her will. She is resistant to any sort of control, defying the expectations of her parents, who wish her stability while confronting a realization that she isn’t having it if it goes against the oft-reckless way she chooses to lead her life.

After her mother’s death, the sisters drifted apart. Julie says her return to Brazil with her father and re-establishing a deep bond with Ursula is an “attempt to take action.” It is a means of fighting grief. With Ursula, she cannot quite bring herself to discuss matters relating to their mother as honestly and openly as she wants to. While Ursula seems more collected, Julie’s bereavement brims with raw vulnerability. The former has had a largely turbulent relationship with her mother, rarely seeing eye to eye on various issues. Whenever her mother came to visit her in Brazil, the two would spend most of the time fighting. Fortunately, on her last visit before her death, things were more cordial. At least they got to share a few happy moments together.

Julie didn’t get to bid farewell to her mother properly. It is only on this visit to her sister that, after many years, she is trying to have unresolved, long-due conversations. There is a lovely moment where the two just laugh their hearts out in a cathartic fit after having many intense conversations. “God, Please Send A Whale” shines with tender honesty in such moments where the three people bare their souls to each other. Though the obtrusively abrupt cuts quickly and inelegantly pace through a conversation to reveal the bruising points, Julie fills the film with so much candor and emotional truth any such niggling technical issues can be forgiven.