Párpados azules
Ernesto Contreras (2007)
In a prologue, the elderly Señora Lulita tells how, forty-seven years previously, she was offered her ‘last chance of happiness’ – implying that youth, or something like it, is a precondition of happiness. In order to take her chance, Lulita had to be able to sew. Bemoaning her inability to do so, she was told by a little bird that she would receive the gift of being able to make clothes for many different kinds of working people. So came about the creation of ‘Lulita’s Uniforms’, a Mexico City clothing company. Every year since the original visitation, Lulita has run a prize draw for her employees – the winning ticket is drawn by a little bird, who hops out of its cage to do the necessary, then hops back in. At the start of Blue Eyelids, Lulita announces the winner of the forty-seventh annual draw. She explains to her staff that winning – the prize is a holiday for two at the luxury resort of Playa Salamandra – is their chance of happiness. (Lulita evidently assumes that none of the workforce is acquainted with happiness – and that it’s unlikely to enter their lives in any shape or form other than a posh holiday.) The winner is quiet, dark-haired Marina Farfán, who seems to have no contact with any of her co-workers and who, we soon learn, is virtually friendless in the world outside. In the absence of candidates to accompany her to Playa Salamandra, Marina offers to take her sister Lucía but the plan disintegrates when the latter tries to persuade Marina to give up her own ticket so that Lucía can use the holiday as an attempt to repair her failing marriage. Then Marina bumps into an awkwardly affable man called Victor Mina, who introduces himself as a former classmate. Although she doesn’t remember him, Marina fastens on Victor as a prospective partner on the dream holiday.
In terms of the events of the story, Blue Eyelids is about two singletons, brought together by their loneliness. The movie describes the ups and downs of their developing relationship, framed within the quasi-fairytale told by Señora Lulita. In fact the film, the first feature directed by Ernesto Contreras and written by his brother Carlos, is much less conventional than that implies. Marina and Victor may both be solitary but they’re far from made for each other. At first sight, he looks older than her; you look closer and can believe they were at school together. (It’s hard to tell their ages – presumably mid-thirties: the Contreras are saying that lives like these may have progressed a fair way in years without much happening in them or anyone noticing.) The early stages of the courtship are torturously slow-moving. (The narrative is also becalmed by repeated still-life interiors, with or without Marina or Victor in them – these compositions are held so long they become self-consciously inert.) Contreras cuts between the two characters, doing the same things in their separate apartments – masturbating, showering, quoting lines from ‘Blue Eyelids’, the romantic film they’ve recently seen together (and with Marina applying blue eyeshadow as part of her preparations for their next date). These juxtapositions are odd – pat in conception but unsettling because they don’t give a sense that Marina and Victor are on the same wavelength. In one other and major respect, the two protagonists certainly don’t match up. The man’s part is better written and, partly as a consequence, better played than the woman’s.
Enrique Arreola makes Victor’s isolation very convincing – and alarming because there’s no obvious reason for it. This man is shy but amiable, evidently thoughtful. In his halting conversations with Marina, Victor, who works for an insurance company, keeps asking if she remembers high-school contemporaries. He mentions at one point that in those days he had a girlfriend and friends among the boys too – now there’s no one. Victor invokes schooldays with a baffled awareness that that’s where social and sexual possibilities stopped for him. Victor is nothing special to look at, credibly forgettable – yet Arreola, a powerful naturalistic actor, illuminates his ordinariness. He shows you the sad disjuncture between Victor’s strong sexual desire and his lack of the social skills needed to build a relationship. Victor is not just short of things to talk about; he’s hideously aware of the abysmal silences that keep opening up as a result. Arreola gives a superb performance.
As Marina, Cecilia Suárez is no one’s idea of a plain Jane and she makes Marina too magnetic. This woman isn’t mousily inconspicuous – she’s closed off in a rather disturbing way. When they go dancing, Victor is very believably overeager. He’s so out of practice socially that he completely mistimes what he thinks are the right things to do. Marina, in contrast, seems relatively relaxed and remote – more easily able to watch other people having a good time, at a distance from them and from Victor. The Contreras brothers tend to cut away from scenes at the point at which they become challenging to develop: when the couple have an unplanned hour to kill at the cinema; in the interval between their dancing together for the first time and going back to Victor’s apartment; most crucially, when Marina eventually decides to go to Playa Salamandra alone, leaving Victor behind. Because Enrique Arreola has made Victor’s loneliness so compelling, the fact that we don’t see Marina away on holiday isn’t too much of an omission: Victor is the main focus of our interest by this stage. But when she asks him to forgive her and he meets her at Mexico City airport, it’s a copout to have Marina voice an explanation without our hearing it. Why does Marina remember nothing from her and Victor’s schooldays? Is she concealing memories or has she always been so disengaged that she’s in effect amnesiac? Marina remains opaque for most of the film: she seems to be an idea in the Contreras brothers’ mind rather than a developed character. It’s not surprising that Cecilia Suárez is continuously striking rather than believable.
Señora Lulita is wittily played by Ana Orfelia Murguía. (There are good performances too from Emma Dib as her nurse and Luisa Huertas as an old woman who shows Victor round an apartment that he timorously decides not to take.) The framing device of Lulita’s story, which seems designed to give Blue Eyelids the quality of a fable, is, however, whimsically artificial. This is especially so in the climax to this element of the film. Lulita is so sick of life and its repetitions that she’s stimulated by wetting the bed – at least it’s something new. She asks the nurse to free all the birds in her aviary and one of the released birds lands on Victor’s windowsill. (The appearance of this winged harbinger of the possibility of happiness, just at the moment when he thinks his relationship with Maria is over, causes Victor to think again.) The film needs the Lulita dimension. Although it’s soft-headed, it supplies a bit of spine in narrative terms; without it, the picture might be too downbeat to get any kind of audience. Yet it’s the dark elements of Blue Eyelids that make it absorbing – they’re reflected in the chilly, bluish lighting which Conteras favours (the cinematographer is Tonatiuh Martínez) and, especially, in his judicious use of Ray Davies’ ‘This Strange Effect’, sung by Dave Berry, as the virtual theme song.
The final scene pulls things together very effectively. When Victor asks Marina to marry him, she accepts with the same curious affectlessness that’s characterised her throughout. This happy ending is at best a relief – that the next stage of unhappy lives has been postponed and we won’t see it when it comes. If you take these characters seriously you can’t believe their marriage will work out any more successfully than the aborted holiday for two, and Marina and Victor know it. When, early on, she resists her sister’s scheme for depriving her of her prize, we get a blast of Marina’s determination to have what she thinks is rightfully hers – whether or not she’s likely to enjoy it. There’s a sense that, in saying yes to Victor’s proposal, she’s driven by the same impulse. This is one moment where we get a coherent (uncomfortable) sense of what makes Marina tick. As for Victor, he’s clinging to the wreckage and pragmatic enough to realise it makes no sense to let go. It may be the weaker parts of his film – the artifice and evasions – that Ernesto Contreras has to thank for its success. It’s still good to see the international breakthrough of the picture, which has been showing throughout this month at BFI. It’s a genuinely unusual description of the psychic consequences of solitude.
20 May 2009
