A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Wednesday, September 25, 2024

Tótem (Lila Avilés, 2023)

Naíma Sentíes in Tótem

Cast: Naíma Sentíes, Montserrat Narañon, Marisol Gasé, Saori Gurza, Mateo García, Teresa Sánchez, Iazua Larios, Alberto Amador, Juan Francisco Maldonado, Marisela Villarruel, Galia Mayer, Lukas Urquijo López. Screenplay: Lila Avilés. Cinematography: Diego Tenorio. Production design: Nohemi Gonzalez. Film editing: Omar Guzmán. Music: Thomas Becka. 

I don't cry at movies, but sometimes I hold my breath in awe. I did so at the ending of Lila Avilés's extraordinarily beautiful and accomplished Tótem. I've never seen a film about a dying man so endowed with life. Everyone in Tótem knows that Tonatiuh (Mateo García) is dying, even his small daughter Sol (the enthralling Naíma Sentíes), and that the birthday party they're throwing for him will be his last. But they soldier on, filling this climactic day with brightness and love, along with some tears and some fights. Tona himself is a reluctant participant in the occasion, battling as he is with weakness and incontinence, but he's drawn into it anyway. The film could have been mawkish, but Avilés takes a documentary approach, concentrating on the noise and bustle of a house full of children and animals. The latter include a cat, several dogs, a parrot, a goldfish, some snails, and a few insects, which add the continuity of life to the tale about dying. There are funny scenes, too, one of them involving the charlatan one of Tona's sisters hires to rid the house of evil spirits, making an nuisance of herself and getting the film's biggest laugh with her curtain line. Avilés choreographs the crowd of actors of all ages well, getting fine performances from even the youngest. The cast was unknown to me, although afterward I discovered that I had recently seen Teresa Sánchez, who plays Cruz, the nurse hired to tend to Tona, in quite a different role, as the tough, determined owner of an agave plantation in Dos Estaciones (Juan Pablo González, 2022). I suspect there was quite a bit of improvisation beyond the script and a few happy accidents that got included, because it's a film that feels lived in.   


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