TIFF 51: Latin American Gems, Part I – Actress-y Delights

by Cláudio Alves

Fair warning, the fall festival coverage isn’t over yet – it will never be over!

I kid, I kid. We’ll conclude the TIFF odyssey next Tuesday, exactly one month after the 51st Toronto International Film Festival screened its last picture with a very silly convo between myself and Brian Rector (aka Eurocheese). Until then, I still have more reviews to drop, mostly capsules that will hopefully spark your interest in smaller films likely to be released in limited form this year or the next. So take these as friendly recommendations, reminders to pay attention when you hear that these films might be playing near you. In that spirit of sharing cinematic joys and celebrating the Davids to Hollywood’s Goliaths, I decided to give some special space to Latin American cinema, which had an incredible showing at this year’s fest, spanning fiction to non-fiction, shorts to five-and-a-half-hour epics.

For this first batch of texts, I’m shining a light on films held together, in one way or another, by sublime lead actress turns. After all, there’s nothing that The Film Experience readership loves more than great actress-ing. They are Diego Luna’s Ashes, Fernando Eimbcke’s Flies, Neto Villalobos’ Love is the Monster, and Gabriel Martins’ On Behalf of My Son…

ASHES, Diego Luna

When adapting Brenda Navarro’s novel, Ceniza en la Boca, actor-turned-director Diego Luna runs the risk of anonymity. Not his own, necessarily, but that of the picture, itself, an exercise in social realism that can feel a tad undifferentiated from a plethora of similar projects dealing with tragic immigrant stories. It’s the tale of Lucila and Diego, two Mexican kids whose single mother, Isabel, immigrated to Spain years ago, in hopes of a better life, leaving her little ones behind. When it’s time to finally reunite, they’re not so little anymore. Lucila is a grown woman, skeptical of her mother’s choices and even more doubtful toward a Madrid - and later Barcelona - that is anything but welcoming, looking ashen and lifeless long before the text looms the shadow of death over this fractured family.

Apart from that graying color story, DP Damián García’s camera often feels as if it’s merely there to record actors breathing life into a dramatic text rather than shaping their work, finding meaning in the images it produces, in framing or other formal possibilities. And the story can also strike one as perfunctory, following the expected paths toward an ambiguous, yet downbeat ending. It’s harrowing stuff that shouldn’t feel as commonplace as it often does, but that is surely part of the point Ashes is trying to make. These stories aren’t special because they’re unique. They don’t deserve our attention because they fall outside the norm or our expectations. They deserve it because they are real, they are human, though they remain far too easy to dismiss as just the way things are.

Luna’s genius doesn’t lie in image-making, anyway. He and Ashes get better when allowing themselves the rigor of wide shots and static compositions, but his ability with actors is where it’s at. The director provides a smart guiding hand, capable of drawing modest tour de forces and delicate characterizations from silver-screen veterans and newbies alike. For example, Anna Díaz’s Lucila could easily fall into the trap of monotonous torpor, but there’s modulation to her moods, a spiky, unexpected shape to her filial resentments toward Adriana Paz’s brilliantly played Isabela. Their last scene together is a barn-burner exactly because the thespians keep themselves in check, restrained, though inside each character a Biblical storm unfurls, roaring loud and thunderous, demanding to be acknowledged.

FLIES, Fernando Eimbcke 

Some of you might be familiar with Fernando Eimbcke’s work from such acclaimed fare as Duck Season or last year’s not especially well-received Olmo. To me, however, he was an absolute discovery at TIFF 51, and I can’t wait to dig into his filmography for other wonders like Flies. The picture that had the Mexican director vying for the Golden Bear at the last Berlinale follows a premise that has cheap sentiment written all over it. Basically, it’s one of those stories where an ornery older person has their heart thawed by the intrusion of a child into their life. Think Central Station, Kolya, Madame Rosa and its remake, even this year’s Italian Oscar submission finalist Gioia Mia – a better film than their eventual submission, but enough about The Spiral.

And yet, I’d call Flies a dictionary’s worth of other descriptors before I’d throw “cheap” or “sentimental” at it. Much of it comes from Eimbcke’s direction, which I dare describe as Campion-like, all about fragmenting the quotidian in ways that defamiliarize the familiar. Editing patterns follow suit, prolonging some moments past their natural expiration date while cutting away from scenes that seemed still in their start before they were already over. There’s a destabilizing power to these gestures, forcing the viewer to consider more carefully the personalities at play in the tale of Olga, our old curmudgeon, and Cristian, the nine-year-old whose father is renting one of the lonesome lady’s rooms while a relative of theirs wastes away in a nearby hospital.

Matters of class complicate our reading of their bond, but so do the vicissitudes of grief and how different generations might process loss. In a wild gesture that recalls Wollner’s Everytime from the same TIFF edition, an impossible embrace materializes in a digital dream, the language of videogames infiltrating cinema’s sanctum and Olga’s life because it’s the only way for Cristian to deal with what’s happening in an existence that’s too small to encompass such sorrow already. And through it all, Teresita Sánchez, also excellent in Pereda’s Everything Else Is Noise, doesn’t thaw so much as she reveals the full tridimensional truth of her character, simple yet complicated, contradicting clichés and those who’d have her smooth Olga’s stoicism or make her solitude more palatable, those who’d see irresolution turned into the catharsis a worse film might have forced upon us, but Flies omits in ellipsis.

LOVE IS THE MONSTER, Neto Villalobos

Remember when the world discovered Paulina García? The now-sexagenarian actress, playwright, and stage director had an illustrious career across various mediums in Chile since the mid-80s, but it was only with Sebastian Lélio’s Gloria that her international profile exploded. Indeed, rumor has it that the only reason that 2013 character study didn’t win the Golden Bear at Berlin was that Wong Kar-wai’s jury was determined to reward García with the Best Actress prize and, as usual at such festivals, only one award per film was allowed. It’s been thirteen years since then, and García has continued to shine on the big screen and garner the attention the world owes her for such genius.

Love is the Monster joins Little Men, Horizonte, Beloved Tropic and other post-Gloria triumphs as proof that García is one of the foremost thespians of our cinematic age. In it, she plays one of those women who feel they can redeem their perceived failings as mothers by being the best, most loving grandmother they can be, overcompensating with a fervor that sometimes borders on mania. It’s a tale as old as time, but the setting isn’t. Working from a screenplay he co-wrote with Diego van der Laat, Neto Villalobos proposes a dystopian Latin America of undefined national specificities where inequality is at an all-time high and the world itself, mother nature long defeated by her children’s exploitation, has turned toxic.

But this is no slice-of-life story. Instead, it uses this desolate milieu to push García’s character to her breaking point when, during an outing from the closed complex where the most fortunate and wealthy live, the girl is taken. What follows is a descent into the pits of despair as the devoted grandmother surrenders to the exploitation she’s known all her life and commits heinous acts in the name of love. Like this year’s Venice champion Woman Unknown, which also screened at TIFF, Love is the Monster raises difficult questions about what one will do when survival is at stake and how much responsibility they hold after succumbing to their worst instincts. Is love a justification or a hollow excuse, the edge of reason or the path toward an insidious individualism where only you and yours matter? Maybe such forms of perverted love are what led us all to ruin in the first place.

ON BEHALF OF MY SON, Gabriel Martins

On a day like any other, the city of Belo Horizonte awakens, its citizens slowly going about their business, moving through their routines, unbeknownst to the tragedy that’s to come. They are faces on a bus, painting a picture across classes, ethnicities, sexualities, creeds, and more. Then, that same bus, a microcosm of society at large, falls off of a bridge, killing almost everyone inside. What follows is the journey of one woman repenting for the perceived sins of her son, the driver who might have chosen to take his own life and brought all those innocents along with him. What happened exactly will never be known, but the mystery is not the point of this drama, where an individual portrait serves as a gateway to a muralist vision of modern-day Brazil. 

In its original title, Gabriel Martins’ On Behalf of My Son is called Vicentina Asks for Forgiveness, for this is her story, meeting with the deceased’s loved ones and the few survivors in reflection of a responsibility she sees herself carrying as any mother would. But is that all there is to it? Vicentina’s ultimate motivations, like her child’s last moments, remain something of a mystery, even to herself. That’s the way of the human heart, after all, existing beyond cold reason and in a universe of unknowability that defies any rules or artificial orders we might wish to impose upon it. Rejane Faria displays all this, an actress capable of holding the pathos of a great Ancient tragedy in a glance, a lifetime of pain in the way her posture grows heavier, as if the burden weighing down on her had a life of its own, constantly expanding.

It’s only appropriate, as On Behalf of My Son follows a similar structure, perpetually broadening its horizons. The script is incredibly repetitive, episodic in a way closer to the stations of the Cross than some peripatetic delight. Through that repetition, it expands our understanding of the society depicted and the many ways grief can manifest, whether in compassion or fury, misanthropy or paralyzing sorrow, a need for community, or, sometimes, a rejection of it. There are no easy answers and no resolutions that will satisfy us, nothing to abate the pain or the pandemonium left in the wake of loss, in the absence left by those who should be here and no longer are. Maybe that’s why Martins must abandon the collective at the end, to contract his work and return us to Faria’s Vicentina and her personal struggle. She is the beating heart of a film that, regardless of its magisterial supporting cast, would be nothing without her standing proudly at its center, a mighty monumental presence, a movie star, a miracle.

If you live in Latin America, you might already have access to Flies, as MUBI has picked up the rights for the territory. On Behalf of My Son, on the other hand, will start streaming globally via Netflix, November 20. Netflix also holds the rights to Ashes in Latin America, Spain, and Portugal, with plans to release it sometime in early 2027.