"Drama" is the first film by Matias Lira, Chilean director with previous work in theater and TV. The starting point of the story is a trio of friends, theater students and who, influenced by a teacher and the method of the French theorist Antonin Artaud, begin to look for real situations and emotions in order to bring them to the stage. The obsession with becoming better actors leads them to know their darkest sides, overcoming limits that they and their teachers could not foresee.
In using the play theatrical, the director provides an interesting approach to what would be the reality and the fictional life, this in the film unfolds in moments of oscillation and an investigation of the public in order to establish in which world the film is transiting, At the same time, that this does not make a great difference, since the metaphor itself is reframed to indicate that it is real or fictitious, what we have are people who in both worlds lie and interpret.
To add to the theatrical play, Artaud's method is added, and perhaps the film also draws on other aspects of the French artist, such as his anarchist ideas and flirtation with surrealism. However, the partnership ends there, and perhaps if it followed Artaud's postulates, "Drama", it would be more successful as a filmmaking. For example, Artaud rejects the supremacy of the word, since the film is only resolved through speeches and dialogues, still according to the French, there would be no distance between actor and audience, everyone would be actors and everyone would be part of the process, Already in the film we have made clear the separation between the central story of Mateo (Eusebio Arenas), who takes on the role of protagonist and where all the other characters are elements stuck to moving his story.
Another aspect that generates noises between the speech presented by the actors of the film and their actions is that, deep down their artistic aspirations are driven by the most hypocritical vanity, it all boils down to a game where one tries to trick or challenge the other, Or in fictional and theatrical life. They are young actors who oscillate between the duties of an approaching adult life and the sheer tantrum of a child who can not stand being contradicted and is not allowed to be mocking. A contradictory life taken too seriously by actors and on the other hand the irresponsibility and jocosity of facing the duties of adult life.
A major aspect suggested and not followed by the film is the Artaud proposal of the Theater of Cruelty, a way of criticizing the culture of the spectacle and the very form that Western society viewed the world and proposed the unification of theater and life. This union between theater and life is approached in "Drama" through the exercises proposed by professor Dante (Jaime McManus) to his students, and that in the film serve only as background, a situation to understand the personality, the fragility, the Fears and traumas of the characters. The problem of this solution that would have everything to be a good script solution is that the reality of the actors in the film are fictitious, in the sense that only Matthew's past is a real torment, in the rest his actions in the daily life, in the Future and the lives of his friends Ángel (Diego Ruiz) and (María) Isidora Urrejola, only settle with forged situations, to give some courage in mediocre and uninteresting lives. As in the situation in which Ángel forces an attempt of prostitution and thus to win the bet of Mateo and later to demand something to him, that perhaps it is a kiss or something more.
Of course, the film is not intended to be a defense of Artaud's ideas, much less promises to be an audiovisual form of Artaudian practices, but it is a very refined background to a hollow story, and this is impregnated at various times Of the film, where the suggestion of things is much greater than the realization of something, the relations to conflicts and possible solutions, everything is very superficial. Still, the triangle proposed more never materialized is interesting precisely by the non-concretization, between the triangular superficiality is more the public's desire to see something, which is a lack of who assists and not necessarily a duty of the direction, that is, the Film at no time presents a real problem in the triangle between these three friends, but at various times suggests individual desires that cause and suggest unresolved issues between them.
If we analyze the title of the film with its meaning we will have something like a fictional text, play or movie of character "serious", not comic, that presents a development of facts and circumstances compatible with those of the real life. Fiction merges with reality itself, and experience becomes stifling as the script plunges into each other's perceptions, their conflicts
