Las Siamesas

Clota (Rita Cortese) is a woman with some health problems. She lives with her daughter Stella (Valeria Lois) in a house in Junín (interior of the Province of Buenos Aires). Stella takes care of her, is aware of her medication and stoically supports the ups and downs of her mother, in those typical relationships of two lonely clinging to each other. But Stella's father (and Clota's long-time ex-husband) has passed away and left her two apartments as an inheritance in Costa Bonita, a seaside resort near Necochea. Both undertake a bus trip there to see how to dispose of those properties. The trip in question will strain the relationship between the two.

Fortunately, the film moves away from the manners with which it threatens and is remarkable and how the camera frame changes as the film changes settings and the tension grows; In this sense, the creative use that the director Paula Hernández makes of the claustrophobic closed environment of the micro is admirable. There are moments of unease when it seems that the story can go anywhere. Hernández's camera achieves a presence, a very physical closeness to what we are seeing, hand in hand with a photograph, superb lighting and sound. The third character in the story is the sensitive Primo (Sergio Prina), one of the bus drivers.

The film is based on the homonymous story by Guillermo Saccomano, to which he changes several elements and prints a different register.

The chemistry between the two actresses is instantaneous. Cortese composes that disenchanted and resentful woman very well and Valeria Lois carries out an extraordinary performance in that tremendous external and internal journey that they undertake. There is no doubt that Clota and Stella, those two "stuck" women, Siamese, locked up, will question us in an uncomfortable and even disturbing way (an accentuated interpellation, as Valeria Lois said in a report about the frameworks of coexistence "accentuated" by the lockdown imposed by the pandemic and quarantine)

The film is part of the Official Selection of the 35th Mar del Plata Festival / Out of Competition and is shown on the festival page until November 26.

Note: Hernández's previous film, Los Sonámbulos, will represent Argentina at the Oscars 2021

I would have never thought it possible for a movie frame to render a siamese bond as perfectly as Paula Hernandez's does.

Moving in an infinite number of levels, especially to women, there's no way you'll leave the theatre unscathed.