12 · 07 · 23

TÓTEM... this world in which we live

Rafael Aviña

Broadly speaking, contemporary Mexican cinema movies, in essence, between two extremely opposite spheres that, nevertheless, tend to point towards the same search: the way to deal with death and memories. The topics of the narco, crime and violence as an everyday act penetrate in society and in the media in such a way that they have become a sort of “common place” or subgenres in their own right, whether it be the intimidating horror, the expectation or the morbidity. And on the other hand, the escapist romantic comedy that avoids any representation of violence in a non-existent country; a sort of filmic- TV set or forum where cheesiness, laughter and sweet romantic plots reign supreme. The result of this equation is a question: how does one confront desolation, sadness, impotence and, above all, death?

In this sense, Tótem (Mexico-Denmark-France, 2023), by Lila Avilés, a seemingly simple film that hides several layers of thematic and emotional complexity, reaches the same conclusion from a proposal antithesis of those representations of the Mexican reality that build the current Mexican cinema. In her debut feature, The Chambermaid (2018) —which won the Ojo for Mexican Feature Film at the 16th FICM, like Tótem at the 21st edition of the festival— the debutant filmmaker distanced herself from “formula” cinema with a story that followed the day-to-day life of a chambermaid in a luxury hotel in Mexico City prone to the usual excesses of leisure and wastefulness.

As in his debut feature, her second film is another observational portrait at the limits of the documentary -including handheld shots- in a different suffocating scenario and a structure arranged in a spiral. However, it goes further by proposing a sort of filmic map full of signs and clues about human and filial relationships, between chronicle and poetry, far from melodrama and very close to the truly emotional and reflective, on a couple of topics deeply rooted in our cinema: family and childhood.

Unlike so many other tear-jerking plots, Tótem is imbued with a naturalism full of signs as in some of Alejandro Galindo's best family chronicles: Una familia de tantas (1948) and, in particular, the vision of the home as a microcosm of what happens “out there” seen in Los Fernández de Peralvillo (1953), where a family gradually crumbles due to the “social ascent” of one of the sons. This is something that coincides with Avilés' film: the dynamics of a family gradually breaks down with the terminal illness of another son, Tona (Mateo García).

Likewise, Tótem partially recovers this intimate and naturalistic relationship between a mother and her children in a pair of remarkable, sensitive and atypical female stories from the “new Mexican cinema” of President Salinas era: Los pasos de Ana (1988), by Maryse Sistach, and Lola (1989), by María Novaro. In all three cases, it is a cinema of minimal acts about generational disillusionment and the endearing mother-daughter relationship with a great deal of everyday realism. This is shown at the start of Tótem in a public restroom, where Lucía, a young mother (Iazua Larios), jokes with her seven-year-old daughter, Sol (the exceptional debutant Naima Sentíes). Later, while crossing a bridge in a car, they hold their breath and make a wish; Sol's wish is that his father Tona not die, and a fade to black takes us inside a hotbed of emotions: Tona's birthday party prepared between disenchantment and enthusiasm by his sisters (Marisol Gasé and Monserrat Marañón) and his elderly father (Alberto Amador), while the camera captures objects, insects, animals, conversations, discussions and more, mostly observed by Sol, who is preparing to grow up that very night without her knowing it.

It is an x-ray of everyday life, feelings and emptiness in its most real description. At the same time, it deals with the enormous responsibility that falls on women, the care of adults and children; an invisible and never recognized work, where children wander without finding their place in the world, observing, internalizing, assimilating traumas, desires, expectations, as it happens in that house that is about to shake like Sol's world. A family that turns to all kinds of ways to find a “cure” for the illness and the pains of the soul or to prolong the inevitable: from the “good vibes” to a “vaquita”¹ for the expenses, the preparation of a cake, interrogating the cell phone through Google, or the healing work of a woman who tries to chase away the bad spirits of the home, called Lúdica “synonym of joy” (Marisela Villarruel) who also sells tuppers. 

Tona is about to become part of that family totem that includes the grandmother who died of cancer and soon, perhaps, the grandfather himself, stiff and tired, whose voice is only an electronic sound of his device, and who has worked for a long time in a plant for his son Tona; a character who is always seen between shadows and darkness and whose only light is represented precisely by that Sun that is his daughter, while receiving physical and emotional help from Cruz (splendid Teresa Sánchez), the assistant, whose presence is essential. The most remarkable thing, besides the camera work, is that Tótem intelligently balances humor and emotion, while understanding sadness as a natural extension of the emotions as a moral resistance of its protagonist. In this sense, the instant in which the camera captures Sol illuminated by the candles of the cake is a sort of reminiscence of Carlitos, the little protagonist of José Emilio Pacheco's Battles in the Desert, when he observes Álvaro Obregón Avenue in the Roma neighborhood in the fifties and senses that after that night nothing will be the same, as Sol also glimpses when the candles are extinguished and melt to black.

Translated by Adrik Díaz

Translator's Notes

1. TN: "Hacer vaquita" is a expression that means to make a voluntary financial contribution from several people for a common purpose.