Todo lo demás

Academy Award® nominee Adriana Barraza can turn anything into gold!

Documentary maker Natalia Almada jumps to fiction with a movie about loneliness and aimless, humdrum life, and it feels just like that... like a documentary about monotonous routine.

I get that was Natalia's intention, to let the audience know the feeling of a life with no purpose, but that doesn't change the fact that it could be tiresomeish to go through the whole movie with nothing but Adriana Barraza's performance.

Adriana is able to take a screenplay with no much dialogue and use it to transmit the nuances and emotions of her character mostly with only her gaze and expressions.

It's not a bad a movie at all, but you really need to be the kind that enjoys the slow ones.

Ignore the reviews here which talk about this movie being boring or assuming that the director imposes their style on it just to be fashionable.

This movie is just excellent. It's like watching a short period in this woman's life -- and, we discover, a period that is likely similar to all the other periods of her life -- watching it with a microscope. There's a scene about a minute and a half long of her washing her nylons from that day in the sink. Look at the details: in the sink; a little bit of soap; rubbing; letting the water out and then running more water to get the soap out; squeezing them as dry as she can make them. A good movie is about highly specific things like this, and doesn't just pass over daily life, especially when the whole point of the movie is the relentlessness of the repetition and loneliness in her life.

Everyone's acting is spot on. This does in fact _look like_ a documentary as the various different characters come to her desk with various issues about ID cards. One woman matter of factly annulling her father's card. One young business guy on his cellphone the whole time and getting angry at her. And so on. Just perfect, perfect pictures.

It's also a telling fact that she works in an ID office, and her own identity is lost to her.

I judge a movie by whether there are any false notes in it, that is, places in it where I can see the hand of the director, or whether I can see the actor _acting_. It never happens in this movie.

And just wait for the ending ...

Long takes in cinema, even if totally devoid of any meaning, are becoming more and more fashionable and supposed to be super artsy, intellectual, and inspired.

So we are supposed to stare at Mrs. Barraza feet because this is going to convey somehow a sense of something (which the lesser beings won't be able to capture, of course).

From start to end, we are actually exposed to bland episodes of Doña Flor's empty life. In fact, it rapidly becomes evident that the director, a documentary maker by trade, and also the writer, has absolutely nothing to say about loneliness... other than filming it and reproducing it like a photocopier. But even as a documentary, it just lay flat, hollow and plain boring.