Mother – Daughter; Daughter – Partner; Mother – Partner Relationships
There are so many things wrong with this Chilean film and not a lot that’s right. The film is about Roberta (Moro Andrea), a 30 year old single mother who is involved with Javiera (Francisca Bernardi), an activist and sometimes actress. Roberta has been trying to earn her mother, Ana’s, (Mariana Prat) respect for most of her life. The fact that Ana refuses to believe that her daughter is gay further estranges them from each other. In an attempt to win Ana’s approval, Roberta decides to take her and Javiera out for a day of sailing.
Javiera and Ana, who was once an actress herself, hit it off right away. While Roberta takes a swim, they drink and talk about acting. Javeria starts a drunken tirade (I can’t remember about what. That’s how uninvolved I was with this film!) and quickly turns Ana off. Ana has too much to drink and not enough to eat and heads below decks. For reasons known only to the director, Javiera follows Ana and tries to kiss her. Things go downhill from there. A storm comes up and Roberta frantically tries to get them to land. For these scenes, a camera was placed on the bow of the ship. The camera followed the up and down plunging of the sailboat throughout the storm. Those scenes were the most realistic ones in the film and have probably made some people watching seasick!
I love a good character study film, and this one might have been that had it not jumped from scene to scene with little or no transition. It was difficult to follow and even more difficult to understand what was going on especially since many of the subtitles were misspelled. I just
never got interested in the characters or their lives. I tried really tried hard to find something I liked about this film, but in the end, I couldn’t.