Most of us go to the movies to escape the stress, anxiety,
sadness or just plain boredom of our everyday lives. And what better escapism
is there? Roger Ebert once said, "Movies come closer
than any other art form in giving us the experience of walking in someone
else's shoes. They allow us an opportunity to experience what it would be like
to live within another gender, race, religion, nationality, or period of time.
They expand us, they improve us, and sometimes they ennoble us." Movies are
that perfect vessel into a new reality—and the best part is they only ask for a
couple hours of our precious time. But what happens when the movies aren't
enough? How far can we go to create a new reality that can exist in our already
real world? Those are themes explored by some of the new films programmed at
this year's Chicago Latino Film Festival, which runs from April 8th
through April 21st.
The opening night selection of the
festival hails from Mexico; "Illusions
S.A." ("Ilusiones S.A."), directed by Roberto Girault, has all the fixings
that a film fest programmer would want to kick things off. It's a period piece
set in the 1950s, featuring a likable ensemble, led by a very good-looking
hero and heroine and heightened by a rousing musical score. In other words,
it's a low-risk crowdpleaser that gets the job done. But it's the concept of
the film that makes it interesting: an agency offers its clients the service of
making their fantasy into a reality. From that logline, it sounds like
an enticing Michel Gondry film, but "Illusions S.A." is more tonally a relative
to something like Tim Burton's "Big Fish" because of its message of the bonds
of a family, and how we must sometimes deceive each other in the stories we
tell in order to keep the family unit together.
In "Illusions S.A." an upper
class grandfather (Robert D'Amico) is afraid that his wife (Silvia Mariscal)
will fall ill due to the devastation of learning that their estranged grandson
(who ran away twenty years ago) died in a ship sinking accident. So the
grandfather hires this agency out of Campeche, Mexico to send in its Director
(Jamie Camil) and new player recruit Isabel (Adriana Louvier) to pretend to be
his long lost grandson and his grandson's lovely new wife—all in anticipation
of their much-delayed homecoming. The film teeters between a playful "when will
these players get caught?" tease and then threatens to veer into total sappy, love
story-territory (roll your eyes at yourself if you can't see Camil falling in
real life love with Louvier eventually). But the implications of fear of facing
mortality and, even worse, turning your back on one's own blood for the sake of
artificial happiness, are provocative; ultimately this is a story of a
grandmother being lied to and her husband knowingly creating a false world
around her simply to shield her from pain. And because of this ruse, the agency
players will always have one foot outside the alternate reality bubble; so the
question is, why suffer through all the trouble? An early exchange of dialogue
between two agency players cynically comments on that notion: "It
doesn't matter if YOUR smile is not real. What matters is that HIS smile is
real." In other words: Don't kill my new reality, man.
Costa Rica's "Presos"
("Imprisoned"), directed by Esteban Ramírez, takes a subtler, more everyday
approach to this idea of creating a new reality. In
"Presos" Victoria (Natalia Arias) is dragging her feet through the domestic
trials towards adulthood. A high school dropout who's living with her parents,
the film opens with Victoria leaving night class and staying up late at a nightclub for her friend's birthday—all while accompanied by her doting
boyfriend Emanuel (Daniel Marin). After landing a steady office assistant job
under the management of her appealing boss (Alejandro Aguilar), Victoria
eventually finds herself in a phone-pal prison romance with her boss' close
family friend Jason (Leynar Gomez). Jason is in jail for manslaughter and it
isn't long before Victoria is sneaking around her boyfriend and her parents to
secretly visit Jason in prison.
This notion of secret infidelity and
under-the-radar interactions isn't anything new; lots of people carry this
narrative out everyday without blinking. Nine times out of ten, when a person is
caught cheating, they'll admit that they had hoped to keep both worlds existing
as long possible. In "Presos" we begin to peel back the layers into why an
individual might need deception and isolation as part of their daily routine:
Victoria drops hints of her father being a deadbeat dad when she was young, the
predictability of her boyfriend's courtship becomes cringe-inducing, the stress
of never making enough money is suffocating and there's the inescapable feeling that this
is all one's life has summed up to. So why not have a little fun and take some
risks to see what might be out there? You only live once, so why not try to
live as many different lives in that one lifetime?
Finally, there's the Uruguayan documentary "Preso" ("Prisoner"), directed by Ana Tipa. This extremely
watchable and fascinating piece of work follows Miguel, a tired but hard
working father and husband. During the week, Miguel is breaking his back
working manual labor on Uruguay's largest prison construction site. With whatever
free time he has at home, he's using his hands and the help of friends to build
extra rooms and extensions for his home, where his mother, wife and two
children live. It's a rudimentary life, to be sure. But Miguel comes across as loving and responsible. Then we see him leave on a weekend … to visit the home
of his lover, where it's revealed he has a small child with her (there are
children in her home, whom I'm assuming are from previous relationships). As
the edges of the narrative frame widen, we see that Miguel's life perhaps
wasn't so rudimentary to begin with: He decided long ago to have this
girlfriend on the side and even co-parent a child with her on the weekends. In
fact, Miguel's alternate "real life" has become so commonplace and domestic to
even his primary family, his wife is numb to his cell phone constantly ringing
with calls from the other woman.
There's an especially powerful scene where
Miguel visits his daughter in the hospital after her surgery and he's
nonchalantly texting his girlfriend while his wife stands on the opposite side
of their daughter's bed. But this isn't a finger-pointing type of film. It
simply observes, as the best documentaries do, with a real warmth and
lovingness to the people; there's the pulse of documentarian Albert Maysles in
a lot of the scenes. A potently ironic scene shows Miguel's children in the
backyard listening to a song that sings, "You hide yourself, you cheat, you
conceal the truth; the lies keep you trapped and don't let you breathe," all
while he continues to lay brick for their new bedroom. But Miguel isn't a bad
person. We see him internally struggling with how he can make both of his
realities co-exist. He doesn't want to hurt anyone, but each world has grown so
big, that they're now inexorably going to collide at some point.
A striking
scene at Christmas shows an emotional Miguel cry into shoulders of his
brother-in-law and he tells him, "Thank you for accepting me despite my
actions." Tipa's film also is strengthened by her appreciation and documenting
of Uruguay itself. There are some ripe passages here, from something as simple
as Miguel's lover explaining the outdated wiring rigging she had to learn for
her wooden home to Miguel's countryside visit for a dinner that includes the
killing and skinning of a lamb. These episodes are at once piercing and
poignant. They help lend the quiet urgency towards Miguel's yearning for a new
reality—or at least his attempt to maintain the two very serious worlds he's
already manifested. What Miguel, and in many cases us, must soon learn is that
our own personal reality is never really little or boring or sad. As a matter
of fact, if we're lucky, our reality affects lots of people, as family or
friendship connects them to it. So when we strive to create our alternate
reality, or double life, we must bear that responsibility and take those
individuals into consideration.
Kurt Vonnegut said it best: "We are what we pretend to be,
so we must be careful about what we pretend to be."
