Sarina Nihei's Love-Hate Relationship is a film that seems to come from the netted emotion of the unconscious, all the while being beautifully drawn by a conscious hand.
The thin pen drawings in this film- colored in with what looks like magic markers—launch a child’s story. But the color scheme, with its browns, yellows, and reds, feels bruised by the stories of human beings, and emotions are sunk in a family trauma that plays out in scenes of oral fixation: An old man offers up the door code for home with his tongue, a half-naked couple threateningly suck a cigarette in the hall, a mother slugs from a wine bottle even though a glass is handy. Mom— her lipstick, her rouge, and her fiery hair, all in red—gives her son a last oral fix he seems too young to drink, a coffee that overflows. Pain seems swallowed, and talking heads march over the pages of books like they do in The Play of Independent Heads (a previous film from Nihei).
