Tag: Lila Avilés

Totem

Posted on by victorfraga

Three generations of a Mexican family share a large house. The grandmother succumbed to cancer a few years earlier. The father speaks with robotic voice through an electronic device, a tracheostomy revealing that he has been afflicted by a horrible disease (perhaps also cancer?). Their daughter Nuri has a small child, and so does their son Tano (Mateo García Elizondo). Tragically, he suffers from the same horrific disease as his mother. He has rejected chemotherapy and instead decided to mitigate his suffering with morphine, in what looks like a palliative care practice.

Lila Avilés’s second feature film, after the much-acclaimed The Chambermaid (2018), deep dives into the lives of a family preparing for an impeding loss. The film is partly autobiographical: the 41-year-old director had to come to terms with a tragically premature death in her own family. Tano’s seven-year-old daughter Sol (Naíma Sentíes) is a stand-in for the director’s own child, and the film is told mostly from her perspective. Her mother is the doting Lucia (Iazua Larios). She has two aunties, Nuri (Montserrat Maranon) and Alejandra (Marisol Gasé), and a female cousin of around her same age. This is a movie dominated by strong females, with vulnerable males forced to face their mortality. A dog, a cat and a parrot quietly observe as the boisterous humans interact. A large bird flies over grandpa’s head as he prunes a bonsai for his dying son. Animals and plants play a significant role, connecting human beings with the environment around them.

Viewers are immediately pushed into the intimacy of the family. The gently shaky handheld camera is rarely more than a metre away from the characters, and abundant close-ups reassure that we become quickly acquainted with Sol’s relatives. The intimacy is such that the film opens with two characters literally on the toilet seat. We are invited to mingle with them on the WC, in the shower, in the kitchen, in the garden, etc. We also witness as they have to come to terms with their physical limitations. Tano does not want to leave his room in order to celebrate his birthday in the garden (presumably his last one). He has to promptly return once he attempts to budge: “I just shat myself”. His suffering is palpable, quite literally. Totem offers viewers an emotional, a physical and even a physiological connection with its characters. At times, the sensation is uncomfortable. As a whole, the experience is extremely sobering.

Most of the sequences are very short, often under a minute. The fast editing makes the narrative fractious, just like the mind of a child attempting to put together the puzzle pieces of the traumatic developments around her. The child actors are outstanding. I would hazard a guess that such authenticity was achieved through a very organic and spontaneous script. The outcome is a credible and riveting story of death seen through the eyes of a young girl. Totem shares this topic and these characteristics with equally impressive Spanish drama Summer 93 (Carla Simon, 2018).

Despite its gloomy subject matter, Totem is a film teeming with hope. It is beautiful and soothing to watch the members of the family do their best in order to mitigate Tano’s suffering, and to provide him with little moments of laughter and joy. Their efforts climax during the birthday party, when relatives and friends perform a myriad of antics in order to cheer him up. Despite their latin temperament, nobody ever cries. Everyone seems to understand that it is their collective duty to remain strong and positive at such difficult times.

There are also hilarious moments, particularly when Sol does what she knows best: being a child. She sticks snails on the wall paintings, plays with grandpa’s artificial voice machine, and clenches herself to her mother’s leg in order to prevent the woman from leaving. A middle-aged spiritist is hired to rid the house from evil forces. She delivers some of the film’s most hilarious moments: “The bad spirits are so strong that I will have to charge you 2,500 pesos and then rest for three days. By the way, I also sell Tupperware”. The family remain open to any possibility of absolution from their suffering, however frivolous and absurd. Maybe a miracle could happen. Meanwhile, they just smile and carry on with their lives as usual.

Totem premiered in the 73rd Berlinale, when this piece was originally written. It was part of the event’s Official Competition, and this writer’s favourite film thus far to win the event’s top prize (a desire not fulfilled). It premieres in the UK in October as part of the BFI London Film Festival. In UK cinemas on Friday, December 1st. On various VoD platforms on Tuesday, January 2nd (2024).

The Chambermaid (La Camarista)

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

This film spends most of its running length inside an unnamed Mexico City hotel (actually the real life Hotel Presidente). There are scenes with views of the skyline from glass windows mostly on either the 21st or 42nd floors, including a running gag about lowering the blinds to shut out the prying eyes of the amorous window cleaner on his platform outside, ultimately paid off when the title character leaves the blind up, sits on the bed and strips off down to her knickers.

This scene is uncharacteristic of the film as a whole, in which chambermaid Eve (Gabriela Cartol) quietly and dutifully goes about completing her daily workload tidying, cleaning and replenishing items in guest rooms on the 21st floor for which she is fully responsible. To do this, she must leave her home at 4am to get to the hotel by 6am. We never see her home, but we learn that she takes showers at work because her home doesn’t have one.

Eve conscientiously hands in personal effects left behind by departed guests. These include a red dress which she covets and for which she has put in a request should the owner fail to reclaim it within a given time and about which she periodically asks both lost property and her boss. She’s an undeniably hard worker whose loyalty is in part retained by her employers’ dangling in front of her a promotion looking after the recently opened, more luxurious 42nd floor. This promotion is the carrot that keeps her going until towards the end of the film the certainty of her getting the new job looks like it might evaporate with the position going to someone else.

The other thing that keeps Eve going is an adult education class run by the hotel workers’ union (until the class is shut down for reasons never fully clarified) which improves her maths skills and gets her reading a copy of ‘Jonathan Livingston Seagull’. It also helps her make friends with the extroverted Minitoy (Teresa Sánchez), a woman who likewise works as a chambermaid on the 16th floor. Elsewhere in the building Eve is periodically hassled by Tita (Marisa Villaruel) who wants to sell her hand lotion and plastic lunchboxes.

We also glimpse the guests as she works around them. The opening scene features a nightmare mess of a room in which Eve discovers what at first appears to be a body on the floor under some sheets but is quickly confirmed when he gets up and starts wandering around to be a dazed old man who has presumably fallen out of bed. Another man does voice overs for or vocal recorded reports on nature films and consistently demands further quantities of amenities be brought to his room. Argentinian mother Romina (Agustina Quinzi) complains about her lack of freedom and gets Eve to look after her small baby while she takes a shower. Eve has a four year old at home and a friend drafted in to look after then child and it’s hard to believe the well-heeled, hotel guest mother’s life is anything like as difficult.

The form of the piece relies heavily on the job of a chambermaid, the camera watching passively in long, unbroken takes as Eve goes about her work in bedrooms, bathrooms and the laundry area. This appears to be grounded in much on location, pre-shooting research by the director because it has an almost documentary feeling of everyday reality about it. And that’s the film’s great asset which makes it so compelling to watch – an entry point into an unfamiliar yet fascinating world which, in turn, takes us inside Eve’s head.

The whole movie, while it must have been scripted, is largely low on dialogue (although Eve communicates with her boss at intervals via walkie-talkie) and feels like episodes may have been moved around a great deal during the editing process. (In terms of its editing it’s among the best films you’ll see all year). For the first hour, you wonder where it’s headed and then the final half hour pushes the piece in some very definite directions. However, it might have been better off without any such attempt at narrative closure, as the more meandering first hour is arguably more satisfying.

The Chambermaid is out in the UK on Friday, July 26th, and then on VoD the following Monday (the 29th). On Mubi for a month on Tuesday, December 27th (2022)