Frameline 33: 'Lion's Den' and 'The Fish Child'

Argentine cinema has undergone a renaissance since the end of the dictatorship in 1983 and especially since the mid-late nineties, when economic collapse triggered a wave of social-realist films which are winning acclaim on the international scene. No director is more emblematic of this shift than Pablo Trapero, whose exploration of the Argentine prison system in Lion's Den ('Leonera') follows other well-received films about police corruption and the working class. Lion's Den stars his astonishingly beautiful wife Martina Gusman in her first leading role as the young, pregnant Julia, whose inability to remember what happened at the scene of her boyfriend's murder has led to her incarceration in a special ward for women with children in a vast and decaying prison complex somewhere in Argentina. The film is shot on location at an actual prison and utilizes real-life female prisoners in a brilliant supporting cast which supplies grit and pathos in measures it would be impossible to achieve by more conventional means. What we get is a movie about a community of poor, marginalized but undefeated women which avoids the cliches of the genre by virtue of its human authenticity and documentary ingenuity. Martina Gusman brings such maturity and fearlessness to the role it is difficult to believe this is her first lead. She's fascinating to watch - for her beauty, certainly, but also for the shifting register of vulnerability, ferocity and weariness she brings to the character of Julia, whose resilience makes her a heroine we can rejoice in. Her pregnancy and motherhood prove to be the redemptive factor in an otherwise bleak existence; her relationship with her son Tomas brings her into the fold of the community as much as it is fostered by it. What Julia learns in prison is what she was denied as a child and discovers within herself as a resource 'delivered' so to speak by female companionship. The many scenes of women with their children in cramped spaces made to function by dint of their fierce will to nurture is the ironic context in which we grasp the failure of Julia's own mother in this respect, and the implication extends to society, since Sofia is a shallow middle-class woman who has pursued her career in Paris at the expense of raising her own child. There is a strong political critique in this formula which is well-served by the location and cast. When Sofia takes Tomas away from the prison she triggers a revolution of sorts which precipitates in turn a surprising and intensely suspenseful conclusion. Frameline's decision to include the film is a bold and slightly curious one; it is more a feminist than a lesbian drama, despite the relationship that develops between Julia and her cellmate Marta, the sexuality of which feels more circumstantial than central, and there are liberal doses of the usual hate-filled epithets (faggot pansy bitch dyke) that made me wonder how the audience was taking it. But hopefully the genius of the film is apparent to any audience regardless of context. This is a rough-cut gem, worthy of the acclaim it received at Cannes and certain to bring more well-deserved attention to Trapero's films and to New Argentine Cinema generally.

Lucia Puenza's melodramatic Fish Child (El Nino Pez) is more conventional, though there are strong notes of class critique in the portrayal of the contemporary bourgeois family in Buenos Aires, and some lovely magical-realist touches with the evocation of the mythic child at the bottom of the lake for which the movie takes its name. The central conceit is a love-story between the adolescent Lala (played by XXY star Ines Effron) and her family's Paraguayan maid, Ailin (Mariele Vitale), a lush, romantic saga of boundary-defying logic which is hopefully meant to caricature the soap-operas it resembles. I found myself bored by a relationship that seemed contrived and idealized in the extreme, but it is possible that a greater familiarity with Argentinian culture might yield a more sophisticated reading of this material. What I did like was the frank depiction of Ailin's predicament and her (curiously, for this drama) natural adjustment to it; as a sexual object in both her life as a girl in Paraguay and as a servant in Buenos Aires she is exploited and manipulated, but her instinct is not to hate or incubate fantasies of revenge. The two girls do plot an elaborate escape strategy, but Ailin is not alienated by her sexual life; the scenes involving her employer, Lala's distracted father, and herself point to an acceptance of the situation and even an affection on her part, which is counter-intuitive and provocative in more ways than one. But when Lala discovers the pair in flagrante the melodrama is ramped up beyond recognition, with a possible suicide attempt gone wrong, an (accidental?) death, Lala's escape to Paraguay, Ailin's arrest and detention, Lala's return and dramatic rescue of Ailin, and the couple's subsequent liberation. Material like this requires more irony than the film delivers, at least for an international audience, but perhaps the irony is meant to reside in the fact that lesbian couples can occupy a melodrama as well as any? If so, it is somewhat lost on a San Francisco audience.