Wakolda
Lucía Puenzo (2013)
The alternative title is The German Doctor and the doctor in question is Josef Mengele. In 1960, he is living, as part of a seemingly large community of German expatriates, in Patagonia, under the pseudonym Helmut Gregor. As played by Alex Brendemühl, Gregor is suspiciously inscrutable from the start of Wakolda, which Lucía Puenzo adapted from her novel of the same name. And the audience – or at least an audience watching this Argentine film with English subtitles – knows his identity from fairly early on: Gregor is reading a newspaper and the subtitle helpfully informs us of the headline attracting his interest: ‘Israeli agents search for Mengele’. The title character is a doll, who belongs to a young Argentine girl Lilith (Florencia Bado). The girl’s mother is called Eva (Natalia Oreiro). Gregor gains Eva’s trust in order to inject Lilith with growth hormones; he also takes a keen interest in Eva’s latest pregnancy. You’d have liked to have been a fly on the wall when Eva and her husband Enzo (Diego Peretti) decided on a name for their daughter: ‘I know – since I share a name with Adam’s better-known wife, let’s call our baby girl after his Apocryphal first mate, created from the same earth as Adam rather than from his rib. It may come in handy if she and I ever become characters with heavily symbolic names in a bad historical drama film. Not precisely symbolic, of course, but it’ll help with the sinister flavouring if the movie’s central figure is a man notorious for his genetic experiments on human beings’.
When, at the start of Wakolda, Gregor picks up the doll that Lilith has dropped and gets into conversation with the child, she remarks that Wakolda has no heart. Gregor then asks if Lilith isn’t a bit old to be playing with dolls. ‘How old you think I am?’ she replies. He guesses nine or ten; it turns out she’s twelve but unusually small for her age. This doesn’t quite answer Gregor’s original question – and it raises another (which remains unanswered): does Lilith want to encourage people to think she’s younger than she is? – but this doesn’t concern Lucía Puenzo. All that matters to her is that the exchange has conveyed the message that Lilith is physically underdeveloped and that her alter ego also has an organic deficit. Wakolda is heartless so that Lilith’s father, a talented craftsman-cum-inventor, can design one for the doll – along with new hair and eyes. Enzo and his wife have just inherited a hotel owned by Eva’s deceased mother but they seem to have very few guests apart from Gregor so that Enzo, even though his wife is pregnant with twins, has plenty of time on his hands to pursue his ambition of creating porcelain dolls. Why do Enzo’s talents correspond with Mengele’s malign science – is Lucía Puenzo making a point about how men treat women? I doubt it – I think she’s merely into image-making. Gregor offers to bankroll the manufacture of the dolls: he does so partly in a vain attempt to ingratiate himself with the suspicious Enzo, partly because the finished products presumably remind him of his own engineering interests – but chiefly to enable Puenzo to show rows and rows of the spookily identical dolls.
Her camera also spends a lot of time moving over Gregor’s notebooks, full of unsettling anatomical drawings, but she isn’t remotely interested in credible character development or dialogue – or even in keeping things tidy. For example, that opening conversation between Gregor and Lilith is followed by a sequence in which Lilith’s family are driving to the hotel they’re taking on. One of Lilith’s brothers, who’s anxious about the welfare of the pet insect he has in a jar, reads about the creature and how it sheds a skin. He asks his elder brother and parents what ‘shed’ means but they reply, incredibly, that they don’t know. When, a few screen minutes later, there’s a conversation about the insect with Gregor, who mentions the skin-shedding, the little boy is no longer interested in finding out what this means; a bit later, however, Puenzo has the same child putting boldly frank questions to the German doctor. When Gregor first asks Eva about her pregnancy and history of pregnancy, why doesn’t she react – or indeed tell him to mind his own business? (This is before she thinks she needs to rely on him.) I’d no idea how Lilith came into possession of Gregor’s notebooks, given that his fellow Nazis arrange for his transport to a new hiding place at the climax of the film. (Lilith survives to provide, presumably as an older woman, bits of narrative voiceover that refer to the notebooks.)
Wakolda may claim to be based on fact but using the Mengele story for a psychosexual thriller of this kind verges on the tasteless. To add insult to injury, the film isn’t in the least thrilling. There’s nothing much the actors can do in the airless aesthetic world created by Lucía Puenzo. Diego Peretti and Florencia Bado are the best – perhaps because it’s easier to sympathise with Enzo and Lilith. Elena Roger, as a photographer who has a fixed significant look in her very blue eyes from the word go, and Guillermo Pfening, as Gregor’s excessively creepy German sidekick, are the worst.
13 August 2014