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This is Cristina
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The title is a deliberate misdirection. This is
Cristina (Mariana Derderián) … but there’s also Susana (Paloma Salas). Best
friends, most of the time. They share roughly equal time in this feature debut
by Gonzalo Maza – previously a noted critic in Chile (I’ve published him in
English, he helped publish me in Spanish), and then acclaimed screenwriter for
film (several Sebastián Lelio movies) and television (political
crime/corruption series Bala loca,
2016). Maza’s wife and collaborator Carmen Luz Parot (Estadio Nacional, 2003) is the chief co-producer here, with Salma
Hayek lending her status as an executive producer.
We follow the daily misadventures in love, family and
creative life of Cristina and Susana: when they are together, when they are
apart (an argument splits them), and when they reunite (a tenderly touching
moment in a generally wry, dry film). Friendship demands work, dedication,
commitment, and it’s hard to maintain across the years – that’s underlined in
the side detail of a street memorial to their departed mutual friend, Eva … a
memorial they don’t remember to visit (or honour) much. The everyday wields its
demands, and takes its toll …
It’s not a queer story, not even in its undertones. But
it could so easily have gone that way, considering what deadhead dudes populate
the romantic affairs of these two women. Rubén (Néstor Cantillana) has separated
from Cristina; he flirts with her anew, and seems to be on the verge of
proposing reconciliation … when he reveals that what he’s really after is the
finalisation of their divorce, so he can move on with his life. An earlier
scene has shown us what a crashing male bore Rubén can be: always butting in
when Cristina and Susana speak to each other, always recentring the
conversation on himself, his observations and achievements. Susana makes her
opinion of him plain, and storms out; that’s what leads to the break between
her and Cristina.
Cristina herself moves on to a fellow she has been
observing warily, and did not expect (of course!) to fall for: the
drama/writing teacher Rómulo (Roberto Farías). Another egocentric type, this
time with a histrionic, slightly menacing flair (he yells, which we hear, and smashes
a lot of plates, we are told). But also, in his way, a full-on romantic, and
(at least according to the logic implied by the editing) the first explosion of
passion between himself and Cristina immediately leads to pregnancy and living
together. Until, that is, Rómulo begins “transferring” his creative drives onto
a suspiciously dark, sullen figure on the margins of the action, Luciana
(Daniela Castillo Toro).
Susana’s problems are less romantic, and more
familial. We observe the last phase of her relationship with the very
tight-lipped and over-tolerant Marcelo (Bernardo Quesney), but her main issue
is with her papa, Pablo (Alejandro Goic). An intriguing detail in Ella es Cristina is the presentation of
the older, parental generation in relation to our central characters. Both
Cristina’s mother and Susana’s father are more gregarious, flakier, more
willing to pronounce their attachment to the waves of erotic life. They head
off on trips, lose their jobs, need money … which is where the complication
sets in between Susana and Pablo. Susana – in fact, her entire generation –
appears more circumspect, rather disapproving of their wilder elders … even as
they make the same old mistakes and suffer the same old heartbreaks. They have
no surer, and perhaps less joyous, a path to equilibrium.
That generational difference is significant. We
observe, with an at times near-ethnographic or anthropological eye, the
lifestyle of a particular age group (early 30s) and a specific class fraction
(bohemian middle), in an educated and cultured slice of urban Chilean society;
in this respect, the film reminded me of Susan Seidelman’s œuvre in its New York context. Not only do characters wear
groovy glasses or possess autographed copies of Slavoj Žižek tomes (there’s a nice gag in that throwaway detail);
they also eke out their living as graphic novelists (Cristina’s own budding
artwork in this genre leans to auto-fiction), actors, writers, directors, performance
artists. There’s an echo of many Philippe Garrel characters in that precisely
situated emplacement, but perhaps
with an extra layer of irony, the merest hint of an auteur’s smirk behind the
camera.
Generically, This
is Cristina is, in some respects and only approximately, a romantic comedy
(I notice that it shares some cast members with the 2017 Chilean portmanteau
project An Ordinary Day). It works a
space somewhere between Woody Allen (in his more melancholic moods) and Garrel
(some compositions in Benjamín Echazarreta’s black-and-white cinematography,
especially out in the streets against fence railings and doors, reminded me of
the crisp, artful, on-the-fly feeling of recent Garrel). The clear division of
the narrative chronicle into parts is reminiscent of Allen.
Maza doesn’t aim for out-and-out jokes, but there’s a
constant low-level ripple of amusement – particularly in the bemused,
beautifully etched reactions on the faces of Derderián and Salas, both of whom
do excellent work here. Meanwhile, a pleasant piano-and-percussion score by Cristobal
Carvajal provides pace, colour and reflective shadings (another semi-Garrelian
touch, but a little more in the Cédric Klapisch or Noah Baumbach ambience).
The film aims for a stoic, only slightly regret-filled
wisdom and whimsy, and it largely succeeds in this goal. Maza captures well
something that is both intensely sentimental and, at the same time, emotionally
reserved in these particular Chilean characters of their modern time and place:
greeting kisses come naturally, but placing a hand on the back of a relative
stranger in need, or allowing the touch of an ex-partner, present a more
tentative, even fraught scenario.
Female friendship, ultimately, offers both a “safer”
and more reliable basis for long-term, communal, even child-rearing relations –
or so it is quietly suggested in the film’s framing images of hauling stuff in
and out of apartments, up and down stairs. As many a romantic comedy has gently
and (bitter)sweetly concluded: life goes on!
© Adrian Martin 9 April 2019 |
