Las herederas

Marcelo Martinessi (2018)

This Paraguayan film, written as well as directed by Marcelo Martinessi, is a contemporary variation on the traditional late-bloomer story.  Chela (Ana Brun) is a woman in her fifties with a matronly figure, a pleasant, nearly pretty face but an overall dowdy appearance.  Socially timid, she has never married.   A couple of decades ago, she’d have seemed a ‘typical’ sexually repressed spinster.  Yet Chela has been in a settled lesbian relationship for thirty years.  It’s when her partner, suddenly and of necessity, is absent from the house in Asunción where Chela was born and which she and Chiquita (Margarita Irún) have shared for so long that Chela’s life takes an unexpected, relatively adventurous turn.

These two are the title characters, both daughters of wealthy parents now deceased.  It seems Chela and Chiquita may never have had to work for a living but their financial situation has recently deteriorated.  The opening shots of The Heiresses display a roomful of the possessions – crystal, silverware, antiques – they are now in the process of selling off.  Chiquita’s bank tells her that her debts amount to fraud, for which she’s sent to jail.  Even in their straitened circumstances, the pair still employ a maid, Pati (Nilda Gonzalez).  One day, Pati announces that a neighbour is outside, asking to see Chela.  This is the elderly Pituca (María Martins), who asks Chela to drive her to a bridge game with friends.

The dominant, vigorous Chiquita has usually done the couple’s driving – Chela no longer even has a licence.  But when Pituca asks about Chiquita’s whereabouts, she gives the impression that she knows she’s inside – hints, moreover, that, if Chela won’t provide transport, she’ll let others know too.  So Chela reluctantly gives her a lift – or, rather, ends up selling a lift:  when they reach their destination, Pituca insists on paying for the ride.  The pocket money is useful; very soon, Chela is running a virtual cab service for the ancient bridge players, to and from the home of whoever happens to be hosting the day’s card party.  This is how she meets Angy (Ana Ivanova), the daughter of one of the bridge set, to whom Chela is immediately and increasingly attracted.  Angy likes Chela too and asks if she’ll drive her and her ailing mother to the latter’s regular hospital appointments.  Chela initially says no – the trips will involve motorway travel, which she’s especially nervous of – but she soon thinks again and agrees.

Marcelo Martinessi supplies the characters with minimal backstory and I found some aspects of their behaviour puzzling.  For someone so long used to home comforts and to getting her own way, Chiquita acclimatises remarkably quickly to life in a female prison.  Is this meant to show that she relishes physical proximity to a novel variety of women or to contrast her extrovert self-confidence with Chela’s fearful reticence or not be remarkable at all?   Pituca says she prefers Chela as a chauffeur because it’s safer than taking a taxi; one assumes the other bridge players feel the same way.  Plausible, I suppose, though I did wonder why some of these old women, most of them widows, wouldn’t prefer sitting in the passenger seat beside a man.  (It doesn’t seem to be a matter of economics:  Pituca tells her friends that Chela is ‘no more expensive than a taxi’ – so presumably no less expensive either.)   Personal safety concerns certainly don’t explain why the much younger and decidedly feisty Angy comes to Chela for transport.  I think the real explanation for Chela’s unaccustomed day job is that it’s necessary for the writer-director’s purposes.

The climax to The Heiresses takes place immediately after a funeral to which Chela has driven Pituca et al.  Angy, who is also attending, gets fed up during the protracted social gathering that follows the service.  She suggests going back to Chela’s until the time the older women intend to leave the funeral party.  At Chela’s house, she and Angy drink wine and talk, closer than they’ve ever been before.  When Angy lies provocatively on the double bed, however, it’s too much for Chela, who locks herself in the bathroom.  ‘Isn’t that what you wanted?’ asks Angy through the door.  Getting no reply, she leaves.  Later that night, Chela, bitterly regretting her loss of nerve, phones Angy and begs her to call back.  Early next day, the doorbell rings and Chela sends Pati to answer it.   To Chela’s consternation, it’s not Angy but Chiquita, released from prison. One of her first actions is to arrange to sell the couple’s car:  Chela looks to revert instantly to  acquiescent submission to her stronger-willed partner.   But, on the morning the vehicle is due to change hands, Chiquita gets up to find  that the car has gone and Chela with it.  This is the end of the film.

I found these closing stages even harder to understand.  Angy, whose sexual relationships appear to have been only with men, is troubled at the funeral by meeting an old flame – fat, middle-aged, respectable, almost unrecognisable from the young man with whom she once had a passionate affair.  Angy tells Chela that the liaison developed into ‘my first threesome’ and that her two male and female lovers taught me ‘everything I know about my body’.  Mention of the threesome is the signal that Angy is prepared to sleep with Chela but why would crushing disappointment at how her ex has aged lead Angy to make a move on an even older woman?  Are we meant to assume, at the end of the film, that Chela has gone off to find Angy or a new life in a broader sense?  In either case, what hope of success is there for someone whose reserve (as her response to Angy’s overtures confirmed) is so deep-rooted?

The Heiresses, which premiered at this year’s Berlin Film Festival, won prizes there and has so far received unanimously excellent reviews.  Ana Brun, who won the Best Actress award at Berlin, is very fine.  A stage actress in Paraguay, Brun is making her film debut here:  her control and naturalness are a wonder.  The succession of minor, prettifying changes Chela makes to her appearance is another subtle strength of Marcelo Martinessi’s debut dramatic feature.  I enjoyed too his determination that this should be a virtually all-female film.  Not only are the men’s roles minor – a boyfriend of Angy’s, a fast-food vendor, the prospective buyer of the car – but Martinessi never shoots a male actor in close-up.  For the most part, though, the progress of the narrative struck me as typical of a particular kind of film festival favourite.   The Heiresses, for much of its (95-minute) running time, precisely observes its characters and is somewhat uneventful.  There’s then a comparatively dramatic climax that has immediate impact but which isn’t followed through in realistic terms (for example, we never get any reaction from the hitherto demanding Pituca and co to Chela’s failure to pick them up from the funeral).  Images in which a character stands within a dark interior, framed by a daylit outside world, are repeated throughout the film, including in the very last shot, as Chiquita realises that Chela has got out of prison too.  This is the concluding stage of the festival favourite – a low-key ‘happy ending’ that is metaphorically neat rather than literally believable. Reality is finally jettisoned, even though, for most of the film, a real-world context has been essential to the story.

14 August 2018