"Gente de Bien" is a low-level, yet gentle, Spanish language drama about class distinctions that exist within Colombian society. It is essentially told from the worm-eye view of a young boy, although periodically breaks off from this perspective for scenes involving adults when it feels it isn't able to convey what it needs to via a child's eyes. The divisions it depicts are between working class proletariat people and what you might describe as the bourgeois upper-class, the likes of whom might own second-homes in the countryside and can afford luxurious holidays. It is a tantalising film which doesn't quite spark, despite threatening to on numerous occasions; by the end, it has relied on the welfare of an animal to convey drama, something executed more efficiently in "Umberto D", and has even forced us into disliking its protagonist for being a stroppy, aggressive brat.
Said brat is Eric (Brayan Santamarià), a 10 year old boy and child of divorce whom the film introduces very deliberately as gazing on contemptuously at his mother as he waits for her to take him to stay with his father. When this transition happens, outside a bus terminal, a place synonymous with travel; change and people either getting ready to go on journeys or just having been on one, his father, Gabriel (Carlos Fernando Pérez), affectionately rubs Eric's head and asks if anybody calls him 'hedgehog' any more, thus inferring a great deal of time since their last meeting. The film does not bother with much prelude: we do not know why they are divorced and we know almost nothing of Eric; indeed, the film merely drops us in the middle of these peoples' lives and depicts a chapter over a Christmas holiday period. Later on, it will close with more questions than answers hanging over it.
Gabriel lives humbly in an enclosed apartment somewhere in the city of Bogota. He appears to be a kind of carpenter by trade and low on money, although earns enough to cook food from original ingredients and enjoy beers with friends now and then. The substance of the class study begins when Gabriel is forced into taking Eric to work with him all day, which is inside a spacious property belonging to his employer Maria uptown wherein he fixes furniture for her. Eric's equivalent here is his father's boss' son Francisco, who has a better bedroom; lots of toys and a video game where Eric has nothing.
This dawns on Eric slowly, and the film is a slow-burning depiction of this process of realisation, brought to the absolute fore when he and his father head out to the second residence Maria owns for Christmas festivities and the final act. During the crux of this study, director Franco Lolli uses a game of 'catch' in the outdoor swimming pool between Eric and his three posher compatriots to cleverly exemplify where the lines in Colombian society are drawn - it turns sour, even violent, and is deliberately contrasted with a game of football in a Bogota street we saw Eric enjoy with a couple of other kids his age during the opening scenes. Everybody seemed to get along there because this is where Eric is from.
I tried to work out precisely what it is the film wanted to say about the class system and why it seemed to think the presence of children in a film about it was so important, but couldn't settle on anything concrete. On one occasion, the film uses disappointingly simplistic imagery to emphasise a point - positioning Eric at the side of the pool and far away from three other boys who're grouped up together at the other end, an image striking enough to make it onto the film's poster. What is being said here beyond the mere fact these divisions exist, and that children can pick up on them? Otherwise, we learn that Eric is prone to a sulk because there are people out there who have it better than him, and that he should behave himself, but also that the richer kids sulk because they're spoilt and even manage to fall out with their peers even more aggressively than Eric does with his.
Lolli doesn't seem to settle on an answer to the issue, depicting people as resigned to the fact they are who they are and belong where they find themselves. There is a striking moment between Gabriel and Maria whereby Gabriel approaches her and speaks frankly in telling her quite simply that he 'doesn't belong here', even concluding that Eric is better off with them for sake of his future. Lolli shoots this scene with Gabriel in profile, which is a composition only ever used by rank-amateurs and those in complete command of the frame when they want to infer conflict between people without depicting any. But what is fascinating is how Maria is positioned: more front-on, seemingly rejecting the conflict; refusing to drag things down to that level and inferring the class issue is not as pronounced as you think.
Thus, the film concludes that a Colombian citizen IS able to become something else through perseverance, epitomised in the fact Maria is a teacher, and evidently able to fund her lifestyle through her well-paid job, and that this is how it should be. Despite this, she concludes in one fleeting moment that her materialistic possessions brought about via the wealth created by this achievement, in the form of a video game, has the capacity to 'rot the brain' of the next generation and it is only Gabriel whom we ever see doing any real labour. "Gente de Bien" is a film I would recommend, though in the full knowledge it is not especially breath-taking. If Colombian class-dramas that lack any sort of proper dogmatic edge are your cup of tea, then you should enjoy it.
