Review of 'Tótem': Mexico's forgotten presentation to the Oscar

One of the first and last things you see in “Tótem,” Lila Avilés’ charming and surprising second feature, is a shot of a young woman’s face. It is a beautiful face, with kind eyes, a radiant if rare smile, and a quiet wisdom far beyond her years. When you meet 7-year-old Sol (Naíma Senties), she is laughing with her mother, Lucía (Iazua Larios), in a public bathroom, trying on a rainbow-hued clown wig that she will wear at another party. late. evening. When you see her for the last time, her delight has faded from her expression and all that remains is a kind of melancholic desolation, a desire to cling firmly to a childhood that she knows is about to change forever. .

Between these two shots, a long day and an entire world come into vibrant focus. For much of the film, which runs a compact but packed 95 minutes, we're in a large, crowded house somewhere in Mexico City, where preparations for the party are underway. The guest of honor is Sol's terminally ill father, Tona (Mateo García Elizondo), observing what will likely be her last birthday. He's been too sick to see his daughter recently, and even after she arrives home, dropped off by her mother, she stays away from him as much as possible. And so, left to her own devices, Sol wanders from room to bustling room, a timid, watchful presence adrift in a churning sea of ​​adults.

The traveling portable camera, wielded by cinematographer Diego Tonorio, follows her, witnessing all kinds of family conflict along the way. Avilés’s technique has become looser, more mobile and coarser than in his 2018 feature debut, “The Chambermaid,” a meticulously composed portrait of a worker at a luxury hotel. But the achievement of “Tótem,” Mexico’s official (but sadly unnominated) entry in this year’s Oscar race for international feature film, is not so different from its predecessor: capturing the spirit of a place.

As if to underscore that notion, the film soon introduces a visiting medium who could help reverse Tona's terrible decline. Avilés, who directs the film from his own script, finds a natural human comedy in this woman's noisy arrival, following her as she assembles buckets of water and even a piece of bread in her quest to cleanse the house of her dark, demonic thoughts. influences. There is also humor in Sol's grandfather's cantankerous complaints (“I'm not in the mood for your satanic bulls…” he growls into his electronic larynx) and also in the stress of Sol's aunt, Nuri (Montserrat Marañon), as she cares for her own young daughter, drinks several drinks and rushes to bake a birthday cake for the party.

When that cake finally emerges hours later, after a smoky mess in the kitchen, we see that it has been decorated with a print of Van Gogh's “The Starry Night,” a fleeting but telling detail (Tona is a painter) in a film that refuses to linger. Avilés insistently keeps her camera on the lookout, as if she were eager to monitor all the inhabitants of the house (the number continues to grow) at every moment. Her powers of observation miss nothing: children fighting, adults arguing, pets scampering under her feet. Amid the tumult, there are brief, wonderfully peaceful shots of ants sliding up and down a wall, and also of a snail sliding across Sol's open palm. Under this roof, all creation seems to converge.

The look with which Avilés contemplates this difficult human and animal circus is both surprisingly unsentimental and tremendously egalitarian. Those bugs and slugs will soon expire, as will the rapidly fading Tona. Portraits of terminal illnesses are nothing new in cinema, but if this one registers with special force it is precisely because Avilés' cinema, concise and relentless, refuses to slow down for Tona. As she wastes away in his bed, making her occasional long, agonizing trips to the bathroom with the help of his attentive nurse, Cruz (Teresita Sánchez), we can already feel that life goes on without him.

The moment Sol is finally allowed to see his father is fleeting, piercing, and filled with the most helpless kind of love. There's clearly more to the story here; We long to see Sol's happier days with him and perhaps learn more about his parents' relationship, which seems to have ended some time before. There's also more to learn about the tensions that arise between Nuri and another aunt, the friends who toast Tona at her party, and the financial burdens that at one point turn the gathering into a fundraiser. It takes a confident narrator to avoid the trap of overexplanation, to give us only a partial glimpse into the lives of his characters, and these narrative elisions have the effect of deepening, rather than undermining, the realism of the story.

Which does not mean that “Totem”, its title rich in spiritual portents, is completely linked to reality. This is a film about a celebration straddling the abyss, and as it progresses, it takes on the mysterious power of a seance. At a certain point it seems that we have wandered, together with Sol, into a strange underworld between life and death. It is as if we have become the ghost of the machine, the specter that lurks behind the camera, and we want, against all reason, to comfort her, to let her know that she is not alone or invisible. The sensation soon passes, as many sensations do. But you can't shake it off or get rid of the cumulative, devastating power of this film.