The premise of “A Better Man,” a startling new documentary by the Canadian first-time filmmaker Attiya Khan, is the reunion of Khan and her ex-boyfriend, Steve. During the documentary’s seventy-three intense minutes, they jointly exhume their disastrous two-year relationship as teen-agers, when he violently abused her. Together, they visit a domestic-violence counsellor, as well as the apartment they shared and the high school they attended, spaces where Steve inflicted humiliation and pain upon Khan. Simply looking at the buildings’ exterior façades causes Khan to become nauseated and, in the Ottawan winter, flushed with upset.
“A Better Man” nominally belongs to a certain set of interrogatory documentaries in which an aggressor and a victim convene to reach some sort of breakthrough: the itinerant child who makes peace with the oppressive parent; the career racist who, upon looking into the saucer eyes of the benevolent black man, renounces the activities of his clan. The ethos of these documentaries is rooted in the idea that social proximity might coax those inclined to dehumanize certain members of the population into quick enlightenment. Sometimes the results are less than feel-good; the draw of “Angry, White and American,” a recent program for which the black journalist Gary Younge interviewed the white nationalist Richard Spencer, was, essentially, lurid juxtaposition. In March, an Icelandic motivational speaker, Thordis Elva, provoked international outrage by collaborating on a book and a TED Talk tour with Tom Stranger, the man who raped her when she was sixteen years old. To many, the value of Elva’s pragmatism—that reconciliation may put to flight the spiritual inertia brought upon a victim by trauma—was undermined by the exculpatory glamour that the commercial tour lent to Stranger.
No such glow illuminates Steve (he has kept his surname private, at least for the time being), who onscreen is often palpably uncomfortable, squirming, trembling, whimpering, whispering. Watching a conversation in which Khan asks Steve, as he visibly turns pale, whether he remembers throwing her on the ground in their flat and punching her, I felt a vicarious satisfaction washing over me; as he answered yes, sounding and looking small and timid, that satisfaction thinned to zero oxygen. But “A Better Man,” despite its title, is not concerned with turning Steve into a better version of himself. Instead, the film seeks to portray him as he is, however agonizing his normalcy may be. More than once, Khan presses him on the abuse that he may have endured before they started living together, instinctively attempting to place him in some cycle of violence; Steve vaguely confirms that there was trouble but does not divulge specifics. The documentary’s cleverness is that it resists the roundness of resolution or catharsis, while also acknowledging that Khan and Steve will always remain some kind of asymmetrical unit.
A montage of weathered photographs of Khan and Steve, who met as students in Ottawa when she was sixteen and he was seventeen, depicts the two grinning, their cheeks pressed together. Khan, now forty-three, has, except for the faint silver in her hair, barely changed; Steve’s punk hair has been shorn, and now he wears glasses. After Khan ended the relationship, the two repeatedly ran into each other in Toronto. During one of these encounters, Steve apologized. This encouraged Khan, who went on to work with people who have suffered domestic abuse and assault, to float an opportunity to him, in 2013. It took six months for Steve to agree to film both their conversations and their sessions with Tod Augusta-Scott, a counsellor. In total, they spent eight days together over the course of a year. Sarah Polley (the actress and director of the documentary “Stories We Tell”) is the executive producer of “A Better Man”; the cinematographer is Iris Ng; Khan co-directed the film, along with Lawrence Jackman. That so many women are in charge of the movie is all the more remarkable given that their storytelling has a therapeutic dimension for Khan.
In her interactions with Steve, Khan mostly inhabits the professional stance she has developed as an abuse counsellor. You can sense her softening her voice, calculating what her body language should communicate, measuring the physical distance between herself and Steve as they sit, drive, and walk. The cadence of her questions resembles that of Augusta-Scott, whom the two meet separately and together. “Do you remember the frequency of the abuse?” Khan asks Steve in one of their first sessions. They are sitting at a coffee table; Khan leans in. Steve’s shoulders slump. “No,” he says, “I just know that it wasn’t good.” Throughout their meetings, Khan recalls the minutiae of his horrific assaults, as if the episodes are replaying before her, at one point describing Steve throwing one of the few trinkets she owned against a wall and then dragging her over its glass shards. Sometimes Steve remembers, and sometimes he doesn’t. It’s not that he ever denies Khan’s accounts; rather, the violence, for him, seems to have dissolved into the churn of his volatile youth. This is the epistemological crisis of abuse, in which the burden of knowing and remembering falls on victim. Late in the film, Khan, in a voice-over, expresses anger at this cruel imbalance: “How could you not remember abusing me every day in that house? I needed you to be the one to say it.” Her question recalls that crucial “if” that has qualified the recent public admissions of guilt from so many powerful men—and those awkward codified phrases we have heard so often of late: “my abuser,” “my rapist.”
At times, Khan’s agitation sneaks through. “I hate that one. I just hate it,” she says to Augusta-Scott, about her memory of the time Steve put her in a sleeper hold. You can hear Steve gulp when Augusta-Scott asks if he remembers. (“I do now,” Steve answers.) At one moment, as we watch Khan receive acupuncture, she tells us, again in voice-over, “You had a thousand ways of saying how I deserved to be hit, spit on, made fun of, because I was brown.” The charge of her words was familiar to me. Since the Harvey Weinstein story broke, I’ve had what seems like hundreds of conversations with black and brown people, who feel a suppressed rage at the contours of the current reckoning. For hundreds of years, it was not possible to rape a black woman, in a legal sense, because she was not, legally, a woman; our national image of victims of assault, of victims in general, is terminally white and female. Some feminist circles tacitly argue that putting racial abuse on the same psychic plane as physical abuse is a distraction; Khan articulates the seamlessness between the two.
The framework of “A Better Man” perhaps owes less to those gimmicky films that dramatize confrontations than to restorative justice, or R.J. The approach has increasingly come up in conversation, as those outraged at powerful men’s abuses realize that firings and cultural expulsions—which remain, however momentous, exceedingly rare—constitute a reaction more than a reparation. R.J. is an alternative to the carceral approach, drawing from aspects of indigenous-community practices in which victims, their communities, and wrongdoers together decide what should be done to repair a harm. Kimberlé Crenshaw’s critical essay “Mapping Origins,” from 1991, defines part of its appeal for women of color, among whom there is “a more generalized community ethic against public intervention, the product of a desire to create a private world free from the diverse assaults on the public lives of racially subordinated people.” But some critics of R.J. have argued that “cheap justice” can embolden abusers: an empty show of remorse is how some people retain their power. Khan recently told an interviewer that she wasn’t familiar with restorative justice before she started to make her documentary, which is careful to avoid advocacy—and part of the strength of “A Better Man” is that its tone is both hopeful and dubious about the potential of that model. Steve, for one, is uncommonly welcoming to the prospect of being confronted and documented, but he doesn’t seem to grasp that there might be something that these exchanges could give to Khan. “I really just want you to be O.K., and I don’t know where you are with that,” he says, in their last meeting. To call this “healing” may overstate how trauma interrupts daily life; sometimes, we just continue.
Perhaps the release of “A Better Man” would always have felt coincidental. It has come out during a peak of awareness about the prevalence of assaults against women, but that should not undermine the fact that this film was, for Khan, the work of twenty years. Since her relationship with Steve, she has grown older, found a partner, had a son. These two people flit in and out of the documentary, reminders that life goes on; one scene shows them giving out white ribbons, a display of support for women who have been abused, to male shoppers at a grocery store. The film concludes with a party. Khan commemorates July 20th, the date she left Steve, every year, not as rebirth but as a testament. This was her twenty-third celebration; the date now honors two accomplishments.
*A previous version of this post misstated Thordis Elva’s nationality.
