There is a sense of diffusion and dispersal to the narrative in writer-director Valentina Maurel’s Spanish film, Forever Your Maternal Animal, holding a mirror up to the scattered lives of her characters and their brittle relationships. Dysfunctionality is the building block of not just the story but its telling as well. The Belgium/France/Costa Rica co-production premiered in the Un Certain Regard section of the ongoing Cannes Film Festival.
The centre can’t hold for Elsa’s (Daniela Marín Navarro) family. On her return home to San Jose, Costa Rica, from an academic stint in Europe, she finds each of the three members of her small family too consumed in their own worlds to have any care or concern for others. Her father Nahuel (Reinaldo Amién Gutiérrez) is having an affair with a younger woman and her mother Isabel (Marina de Tavira) is preoccupied with the reissue of the collection of erotic poems she wrote in her youth and getting a facial surgery for eyebags removal.
Much to her consternation, Elsa finds her younger sister Amalia (Mariangel Montero) to be the only one to continue to stay in the family house, with a dirty dog for company, after having dropped out of college. She misses her beloved nanny, is delusional, almost on the verge of a breakdown and fraternises with men of questionable repute. The neglect, chaos and grunginess of the home parallels the state of the physical, mental, emotional and financial health of Amalia. Her bank account is blocked and the kitchen sink clogged. It’s a reflection of the lack of attention and support from her parents and her own inability to grow up and connect with herself. Her habit of changing the locks on the main door, points to the wilful attempt at not letting anyone enter her world.
Forever Your Maternal Animal is the first feature film by a Costa Rican filmmaker to figure in Cannes selection, though Maurel’s Belgian short Paul is Here played in the official Cinefondation (now La Cinef) section in 2017, winning its first prize.
Maurel makes her sophomore feature an insightful interplay among three women and is astute in her examination of the fraught, knotty parent-child bond; quite like her 2022 debut, I Have Electric Dreams.
It’s all about tough love with the fractures in the family getting split wide(r) open with each moment in time. What’s more, Elsa alone seems to feel any burden of responsibility and regret.
The existential crises leaps out in the many conversations between characters that appear to be going nowhere and the aimlessness resounds in the meandering narrative. In fact the sense of drift and disruption goes beyond the writing to even the way the film has been shot and edited.
Cinematographer Nicolás Andrés frames the individuals in a manner that turns their thoughts and feelings tactile. We often see Elsa and Amalia from a distance, lost in the crowd, walking the busy streets as though on some obscure mission. In the conversational scenes they get shot in extreme proximity as though the camera is trying to dredge out the inner pain and hidden tensions. However, there’s no attempt to get judgmental about the characters and their relationships.
Betrand Conard's editing feels like it’s stitching together random moments in the lives of the protagonists rather than make an effort to give any coherence to the film. The rifts in relationships correspond with this seeming disjointedness in the scenes and the fragmented structure.
The performances of three actresses are as real as they can get. Veteran Marina de Tavira (seen earlier in Roma) and young Daniela Marín Navarro (the lead in I Have Electric Dreams) are wonderfully in tune with each other. But it's Montero who steals the show in her first film, bringing out the hurt at being abandoned, the loneliness and anxiety and violence and vulnerability of the mercurial Amalia with conviction and facility. Not once does the audience feel that she hasn’t faced the camera before. An actress to watch out for.