Titile: Viudas (Widows)
Year: 2011
Genre: Drama
Director: Marcos Carnevale
Writer: Marcos Carnevale, Bernarda Pagés
Runtime: 100min
Cast: Valeria Bertuccelli, Graciela Borges, Rita Cortese, Martín Bossi
Produc.: Aleph Media, Corbelli Producciones, Instituto Nacional de Cine y Artes Audiovisuales (INCAA), Patagonik Film Group, Tronera Producciones
In Widows, one morning Elena (Graciela Borges) is directing a
documentary when she receives an urgent call from the hospital, where her
husband Augusto has being recently admitted. Interrupting the shoot, Elena
arrives at the sanitarium at the precise moment when the doors of the operating
room are being closed and Augusto has been hospitalized for a stroke. Nonetheless,
accompanying the stretcher was a girl, her name Adela (Valeria Vertuccelli),
which now she sees walking away and whom Elena does not knows.
Elena, sitting
in the waiting room waits with Esther (Rita Cortese), her friend and assistant,
when she sees through the window that in the courtyard is the girl she had seen
before, and occurs to her that she must be the one who found and brought him to
the emergency. To remove this doubts Esther decides to go talk to her, while
Elena sees them from the other side and unable to hear a word of it. We hear a part
of the conversation, where a young woman too concerned as to be a stranger,
informs Esther that she does not intents to go until Augusto recovers. We see
the rest of the conversation from Elena´s point of view and only based on
physical mannerisms. When minutes later Esther goes back inside, watching her
words she would tell her friend that she was right and that the girl was the
one who found him and brought him in.
So far the
situation seems to have nothing unusual, except that in another scene a nurse
asks Elena to remove her daughter from her father's bed, something that Elena
does not understands. Then, when she enters the room and sees this stranger
lying next to her husband, she sends her out immediately, enraged.
Back with her
husband and now angry, Elena asks a man unable to answer, in his state of
unconsciousness, if he was cheating on her, but it is understood that what
Elena wants is to unload.
Later, in the
day of the funeral Elena and Esther are leaving after the last goodbye when
they see Adela approaching, now with a bouquet of flowers she delivers to
Elena, who short-tempered, in turn gives them away to Esther.
After the last
meeting, and when it has become clear that Adela had been Augusto´s lover,
Elena prepares to start living without the man who she loved, without
having any idea of the problems that are to be coming,
because this girl does not intend to leave her alone. Then, on the day of her
birthday Elena receives an unexpected and unwanted visitor. Adela with a
bouquet of flowers waits for the door to be opened to her, but Elena asks her
through Justina, the maid, to leave. At nightfall Adela comes back to insist, this time
calling her on the phone and wishing her happy birthday, testing the tolerance
of a widow who wants to be left alone. So the director continues to anticipate
as what is coming, while making us wonder what could be this girl´s problem. Is
she perhaps crazy? Or is she some kind of psychotic?
Finally, Elena
gets a phone call to which she says that yes, she is the one their looking for,
but no, she has no daughter. However, now things have become larger and she is
being urgently needed. Elena arrives at the apartment that Adela had shared
with her husband, to meet with the lucky survivor of a suicide attempt lying on
a bed in full cry. Within the environment of that apartment Elena has become
unwittingly the mother of this girl, after that for some strange reason she had
been contacted after the attempted self-elimination. One at this point could
try to get into the thoughts of this poor widow and wonder what could be this
girl´s intention. To make matters worse, Adela continues to express how sorry
she is to bother her, always in tears, as if it were a consolation to a tired Elena. But
the thing does not ends there, as from here on Elena will take Adela
temporarily under her roof until she recovers. Because apparently, the options
boil down to that or that the girl stays in her own apartment, with the rent
not yet paid, and that she ends up being throwing out.
Thus, using
some very specific situations is that director Carnevale has been able to show us
how, by a twist of fate, these two women of different realities but who share a
common bond, end up being roommates, one who aspired that, and the other,
unwittingly.
Once Elena and
Adela are together is when we finally found out what the real conflict in this
film is, which is not that of a widow who must get used to living alone, or of
a girl with obsessive behavior. Here the conflict is of a widow (older
person who lives with the normal realities of old age) who must learn to cope
with her grief, carrying with the sorrow of a girl who has had the audacity to
fall in love with "her" husband. Because at the same time, Augusto
being a married man had the nerve, not only to cheat on her, but after dying, of
leaving her to the care of her lover, who is almost a child and could have been
his daughter.
Something here
to point out concerns to the relationship that develops between the two women
living in Elena´s place. While it is true that in the movie we often see them
distant from each other and in silence, every time we see them together and
talking, it ends up being Adela who tells Elena how good he and she hanged out
together, how they laughted, or how Augusto insisted that he could never imagine
a life without Elena at his side. This in turn would be like a bucket of cold
water to Elena, for whom it was probably unreal to think that her husband had
shared so many intimate moments with this girl.
If we wanted to
be more precise we could even define a second issue of interest
in this movie, and that relates to the idea that love goes beyond the distance among ages. Probably anyone could find it easy to conceive that a man of
about seventy years of age to be attracted to a young girl, but not equally
normal to see that a girl in her thirties may feel sexually or emotionally attracted
to an older man.
In Widows it is done quite well, showing us
the collision of problematics that occurs between these two women, and where
one is forced to give in if both want to get on.
Also noteworthy
is the performance of Valeria Bertuccelli as an Adela that feels lost, since
Augusto´s death appears to have taken with him also part of her soul.
My rating: 7/10
My rating: 7/10
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