theapinbetween Reviews

Our Mothers (2019)

Story and history intertwined in the search for identity

[8/10 · 29 March 2021]

Ernesto, a young forensic anthropologist, is working on the identification of victims of the civil war in Guatemala, when the testimony of an elderly woman rekindles his hopes for news of his father, a guerrilla fighter killed by the military.

The film interweaves the protagonist's personal story with historical events, focusing on the importance of female figures, women, mothers and wives who bear the consequences of the war on their skin. A story whose themes such as the search for identity, the sense of motherhood and the atrocities of war have a universal value, but at the same time brings to light the events of a country and people ignored by most.

Thanks to a good direction and effective performances, Our Mothers succeeds in doing justice to both story and history.

Scales (2019)

A tale of emancipation that lacks depth

[6/10 · 29 March 2021]

In a remote fishing village, firstborn girls are thrown into the sea and sacrificed to the sirens, in a propitiatory rite that is repeated every full moon.

Hayat is initially rescued by her father, but years later, when his second son is born, he forces her to meet her destiny: she saves herself by managing to get out of the water carrying the body of a mermaid. Thanks to this, she manages, with difficulty, to integrate into the fishing community, transforming herself from victim to hunter: in fact, in a cyclical and paradoxical perpetuation of violence, the girls sacrificed to the sea become the mermaids that are caught in the fishermen's nets.

Hayat is a half-creature: distanced and marginalised by women, she cannot really fit into the world of men; she captures mermaids, but in part she is one herself. Her uniqueness is not motivated, we do not know how she managed to survive, nor how she hunts, yet this is the only element that justifies her emancipation, which is thus given a priori, diminishing the viewer's empathy and understanding.

Scales retains the elements of charm and mystery in the staging of the fairytale-like setting, but the potential effectiveness of the story is weakened by somewhat sketchy developments and a lack of real character development. Thus only its symbolic value remains.

Paraísos artificiales (2011)

A beautiful feeling of suggestion and hope

[7/10 · 11 April 2020]

Paraísos Artificiales is a short parenthesis of an hour and something in the lives of two people, Luisa and Salomón. Luisa is fighting with heroin addiction, and takes refuge in a bungalow in a seaside resort outside the summer season, where she befriends Salomón, a local worker. It's a friendship of few words and also of solidarity. The sad and windy landscape, the dark green of the vegetation and the dark grey of the sea envelop the characters in a suggestive and unusual setting, immortalized by a beautiful cinematography. This is a film perhaps too short and too little deep to say anything more, it remains suspended like this little lost paradise and Luisa's days and future, but it leaves you with a beautiful feeling of suggestion and hope.

Maggie (2018)

Loose but fruitful

[6/10 · 23 January 2020]

Told by a fictional narrator which gives name to the film, Maggie revolves around the misadventures of a young nurse working in a hospital. It doesn't focus on a particular event, but rather on different episodes which are linked by the idea of trust and misunderstanding. The film deals with it with funny, non-sense kind of gags and situations, alternating out of line situations with more realistic ones, but its distinctive feature remains its voluntary eccentricity. Even if I found it at times loose, lacking a central, solid connection, I still enjoyed its creativity and abundance of ideas, which I found to be reasons good enough to watch a movie and to give credit to its authors.

Donnie Darko (2001)

The end of the world in the eyes of a teen weirdo

[9/10 · 14 January 2020]

Yesterday I saw Donnie Darko again after several years, which when I was younger was one of my favourite movies. I saw it again by chance, and I was on the one hand enthusiastic and incredulous that I had almost removed it from my mind, and on the other curious to see it with new eyes, and to find out if I would still like it, or if I would find too obvious flaws that would make me reconsider in my cinematographic tastes. Well, it didn't. I'm more specific: I'm perhaps partly tendentious , due to the fact that Jake Gyllenhaal in his version of a teenage wacko - who in the end is not a psychopath who kills innocent victims, but rather one who saves the world - , the trope of the weirdo, as well as the science fiction-philosophical theme, are elements, which, in any case, always have a certain charm on my imagination. But I can say that, beyond that, I still think Donnie Darko is a very good film. Filmed in the very early 2000s, and set in the 1980s (before the revival for those years went crazy), it creates in my eyes a strange synthesis between the society of the 1980s represented in the election clash between Bush and Dukakis, but especially in the school and provincial environment where the story takes place, and that of a little more than a decade older, through whose lens the story is told, which is based on different scientific theories, reworking them in a creative way, adding dreamlike and fantastic elements, and telling it from the point of view of a teenager, thus bringing the science fiction genre closer to the teen movie genre, making an American teenager the medium for talking about the bigotry of American society and the pressing end of the world, which in a certain way is a consequence of the degeneration of this same society (and the fact that the film was released in 2001 is, seen in retrospect, almost disturbingly significant). Jake Gyllenhaal is very good at playing Donnie, and I'm not sure if it was this film that launched it, but if so, he's more than deserved it. The special effects used in the film are definitely 'dated' if you look at them now, but, at least for me, who's not a fan of spectacular special effects, they retain their charm, aesthetic and emotional, capable of supporting the narrative without overwhelming it. And how not to mention Frank, the creepy rabbit that accompanies Donnie, even if only to remember one of the cinematic creatures that have most imposed themselves in the collective imagination? Donnie Darko became a cult in the 2000s, and now it's fallen a little into oblivion: I hope it won't stay there, because it still deserves to be watched and re-watched.

Pompeii (I) (2014)

Visual effects try to make it up for the lack of decent narration

[3/10 · 3 January 2020]

Classic example of Hollywood movie in which the massive use of special effects tries to cover the mediocrity of the narrative. The storyline is shallow, unrealistic, full of already heard lines and dynamics. The only element of surprise in the narrative might be the ending, which is instead the part where an already seen and predictable happy ending would have been the best choice to give a meaning to the overall story. The soundtrack is beautiful, but not much space is given to it.