Tag: Chile

Immersion (Inmersión)

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

QUICK SNAP: LIVE FROM TALLINN

A taut and smart Chilean thriller that blends societal unease with pure genre pleasures, Immersion is a gripping experience right from the start. The kind of clever, compact feature often missing in official festival competitions, it might also be the one with the best chance of commercial success.

Ricardo (Alfredo Castro) is divorced, taking his daughters Tere (Consuelo Carreño) and Claudia (Mariela Mignot) on a boat trip to see his brother’s house. His rift with his more spunky daughter Tere is rather pronounced from the beginning, drawing his ire when she decides to bathe topless. Then he spots three men on a boat quickly filling with water. Instead of helping them, he drives away as quickly as possible.

It’s obvious the story doesn’t end there, Tere goading her father to return to help these men; leading to a fascinating game of wills that keeps the tension constantly rising. There is an obvious racial element to proceedings. Ricardo and his daughters are white, while the fishermen are Mupache. Ricardo initially says he didn’t want to pick up them up simply because he doesn’t like their faces. He is a deeply paranoid man: he obviously believes that they will rob him, setting the scene early on when telling stories of houses being burned and looted by the locals. No mention of whose land it was in the first place, of course…

Immersion shows that you can do so much in a thriller just through suggestion and foreboding, and how paranoia can often be the most dangerous emotion of all. While some of the twists can feel quite contrived, including Ricardo’s constantly changing mindset, Castro is able to embody privilege, loathing and self-righteousness with immense ease, selling us on each further plot development.

Even if the film’s premise is an exceptional circumstance, it actually plays on one of the most relatable of issues: the impossibility and stress of making decisions on a family holiday. As they scramble across the lake to come to a final decision, each solution naturally ends up frustrating someone. What’s even more impressive is that even while Ricardo is a reprehensible person, we can’t help but feel sorry for him. Trying to tell your daughters what to do on holiday is already a nightmare for most people.

It’s amazing how much action takes place just on the boat itself, without ever losing our interest. The white sailboat (tellingly powered by motor) becomes a deeply claustrophobic place, the surrounding water always suggesting a sense of danger. In fact, it’s the kind of simple high concept thriller premise that American producers might be angling to remake. Of course they won’t need to. Immersion already does the job incredibly well. This is the kind of smart thriller that knows that it doesn’t need to do much to be a success, while also making you think about race and class dynamics in the process.

Immersion plays in the First Feature Competition at the Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival, running from 12th – 28th November.

Messi and Maud (La Holandesa)

Posted on by victorfraga

They say that children are the gifts that keep on giving, yet for many couples out there, their Christmases, birthdays and anniversaries seem empty of gifts. So it is for Frank (Guido Pollemans) and Maud (Rifka Lodeizen), both now past 40, eager to put a decade of miscarriages and false starts behind them. Flying to the Andes, an awaited rebirth is marred by another miscarriage, the following argument causes Maud to abandon her husband for the barren countryside. Only through a chance encounter with 8-year-old Messi (Cristobol Farias), does Maud re-discover the value of life.

Lodeizen delivers an extraordinarily well put together performance, even if the story sounds very conventional. Twelve minutes into the film and Lodeizen clothes herself in funereal black robes, wailing at the failures her blond body holds. She holds the contrived moments with an elegiac loneliness, aching for a child of her own to carry and hold. Her travel companion is the very thing she’ll never bear, a sprightly child, fervent, feverish and full of life. Together, Maud and Messi walk through the cascading South American deserts, pushing and pulling each other through their collected journeys.

Messi too holds a troubled history, his boorish father decrying the woman who bore him a whore and a mad woman. In Maud he finds a mother figure, in Messi, she finds a child. Inevitably, they must leave each other, but it’s not the collective destinations that makes the film so interesting. It’s the journey.

It’s richly illustrious in photography, the varying montages showcasing the lush escapades that entices tourists to the Patagonia. Much like the two leads, the landscape offers excitement, restraint, melancholy and possibility. And yet there’s a sadness at play. Messi will likely leave his fellow pilgrim to a dubious household, Maud must return to a childless marriage. Surrounded by this prosperous arid regions, where plants and soil meet, Maud comes to terms that her body will never grow and flower a life of her own.

While a little heavy-handed at times, the end result is an emotive one, celebrating the virtues of womanhood that exist outside of the womb. Lodeizen is excellent, steering the journey that a viewer can enjoy, but understands that Maud is not and will not be the only woman who has walked in these unenviable steps.

Watch Messi and Maud for free during the month of December only with ArteKino – just click here for more information.

Gloria Bell

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

When I saw the Chilean film Gloria (Sebastián Lelio, 2013) some years back, I was blown away. The story of a 50-something divorcée going out and finding herself sounded like the sort of movie I’d hate… and yet, against the odds, Lelio’s film, particularly its feisty central performance by Paulina Garcia, completely won me over. I recall it having a pretty decent Latin music soundtrack too, culminating in Umberto Tozzi’s triumphant disco anthem Gloria.

Leilo having in the interim carved himself out a respectable international movie career – an Oscar for A Fantastic Woman (2017), an impressive change of pace with the British drama Disobedience (2018) – he’s had the inevitable offer to remake some of his Chilean output for the US market. In Gloria Bell, adding the character’s surname to the title for the remake, he collaborates with sometime Oscar-winning actress Julianne Moore.

So all the ingredients should be there to deliver something very special, whether you’ve seen the original and are going for the comparison or you are coming to the story for the first time here. And yet, somehow, the new film feels flat. It lacks the magnetic quality of the original.

Maybe it’s the difference between Chile, rarely seen on the screen here in the English-speaking world, and the US whose movies have flooded our cinemas. Maybe it’s the 80s’ US disco music on the soundtrack which replaces the original’s far more vibrant Latin selection. Certainly, it peps up at the end when the title song (this time the American version recorded by Laura Branigan) comes on, but it’s far too late by then.

Apart from shifting the story from Santiago to Los Angeles and the heroine from Chilean to American, the story is pretty much identical. So it’s hard to believe the problem is the script adaptation. This even applies to the trailers – the trailer for the original Gloria can be seen for comparison further down the page below the Gloria Bell trailer.

The plot has 50-something Gloria (Moore) go to discos in search of love and eventually embark on a relationship with divorced father Arnold (John Turturro). Cue unflattering, over-fifties sex scenes in which he has to remove a medical girdle he wears round his waste, all very commendable in terms of visual representation of that demographic.

Gloria has pretty much learned to let her grown up kids get on with their own separate lives while she gets on with hers. Her son Peter (Michael Cera) is dealing with an absent partner who has left home for a while to find herself and leave him to bring up their child. Her daughter Anne (Caren Pistorius) is on the verge of moving to Sweden to make a life with a surfer she met via the internet. By way of contrast, Arnold seems to be constantly under pressure from his two daughters who we never see but are constantly making demands of him over the phone.

After much resistance, Arnold is persuaded to come over for a meal and meet Gloria’s family – not only her kids but also her ex-husband. The evening proves too much for Arnold and marks the beginning of the end of his and Gloria’s relationship. Except that, try as she might to cut him off, Arnold doesn’t want it to let her go…

Julianne Moore is on the screen most of the time. Where the original film and Paulina Garcia’s seemingly effortless performance in it felt like a welcome breath of fresh air, however, if you’ve seen the original, this one feels like a pointless retread with Moore failing to add that certain something that Garcia brought. Which is a pity, because on paper this remake sounded like it might be really quite something.

Gloria Bell is out in the UK on Friday, June 7th. Watch the film trailer below:

And here, for comparison, is the trailer for the original 2013 Chilean film Gloria: