The Boy Who Never Cried

I Still Haven't Left It

I watched Balan the Boy recently, and I still haven't left it.

I kept placing myself inside the boy while watching. Not as an observer, but as him. Trying to feel what he felt, survive what he survived. And every time I tried, I was dumbfounded. Because I know I wouldn't be able to. Not because I'm weak, but because I was never forged that way.

I had a childhood where I got to discover myself. Balan never did.

The Boy Who Never Cries

The peculiar thing about him is that he never cries. In situations where every child would cry. In situations where most adults would cry. The film never points at it or asks you to notice. It simply lets it exist.

The most frightening moment wasn't his mother's suffering. It was his face when someone asked him his name. He paused.

Not out of confusion or shyness. There was simply nothing there to answer with. Nothing he knew about himself outside of what the singular entity that was his entire world had taught him.

Love That Leaves No Room

Most people will walk out celebrating the bond between mother and son; and they're right to. The love is completely real. But I walked out seeing the mother as the quiet villain. Not out of malice. Out of love.

But love that leaves no room for separateness is still a kind of theft. She grounds him entirely to her survival, her world, her journey. And in doing so, she takes from him the one thing no one can give back: the years where you discover who you are.

The most suffocating things in life often come wrapped in genuine love.

What Made This Personal

What made this personal for me is that I'm an adult watching him. I can understand what he's going through in ways he can't, because he's inside it. I have the distance to replay my own childhood and finally understand what I absorbed without knowing it.

He doesn't.

That gap, between my comprehension and his unknowing, was the most affecting thing about the entire experience. I left the film with two things I couldn't separate from each other:

Gratitude that I got to find myself. Grief that he never will.