Quiet, Powerful, Award-Winning Slow Burn ‘The Heiresses’ [Transilvania Review]

The visiting women — and it is always women — appraise the neatly laid out ornaments, cutlery and linens in a large colonial drawing room with impatient disinterest. They’re like already sated carrion birds idly picking at a carcass. Or that’s how they must look to Chela (Berlin Best Actress Ana Brun), the timorous mistress of this once-plush Paraguayan home, who watches its gradual dismantling with startled, dismayed eyes from shadowy hallways through doors that creak ajar. The women ting the rims of crystal glassware and ask if the flatscreen TV in the other room is for sale (it is not). They haggle over dining room tables and expensive paintings. Chela retreats to her shuttered bedroom and leaves her more worldly long-term partner Chiquita (Margarita Irún) or their new maid Pati (Nilda Gonzalez) to deal with the crass business. In a few deft, quick strokes, Marcelo Martinessi‘s immaculately observed, immersively evocative debut “The Heiresses” has established so much: this is a world of women (there’s scarcely a single man featured in the cast) in a social setting of genteel decline so inescapable as to be oppressive.

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But the film, which won the top prize in the Transilvania International Film Festival on the foot of its two awards out of Berlin, is also a story of tentative liberation, offering the slenderest of hopes that though change is inevitable and often unfair, it can also bring renewal. Such change is thrust upon the companionable couple when the pragmatic Chiqui is sent to prison for fraud — which was actually her way of trying to shield the fragile Chela from the reality of their worsening financial situation. They put about a cover story that Chiqui has gone on vacation, and while friends work to get her freed, Chela seems content to wait out the sentence by retreating further into herself and the eroding cloister of her lifelong home. But then one day her neighbor, the catty, bejeweled Pituca (a lovely spiky turn from María Martins) asks Chela to give her a ride to her regular bridge game, and somehow Chela overcomes her prideful scruples enough to end up running a sort of taxi service for her and her friends. That’s how Chela meets Angy (Ana Ivanova), Pituca’s lithe, attractive niece, who has just broken up with the latest in a series of bad-news guys.

Chela’s burgeoning attraction to Angy is almost all communicated in Brun’s shyly dazzled expression. Indeed, Chela’s ingrained, classist diffidence and inarticulacy is so paralyzing that it can get frustrating, and since she drives so much of the film’s rhythm and pacing, you sometimes want to urge her on to some more full-blooded action. But this is not that sort of film. Instead, it is one told as an accretion of tiny, exquisite details: a glowing glance; a pair of sunglasses handled like a holy relic; an old record slipped from its paper sheath; a breakfast tray arranged with mathematical precision, always the same way, every day. What the film lacks in forward momentum it makes up for in its heady sense of place, and its observation of the way our havens can also become our prisons. Chela seems stunted to the contours of her home, her class, and her outmoded ideals, in the way a watermelon will grow square if you cultivate it in a box. At first, even her new job as a driver offers only illusory freedom — she is too frightened to drive on the motorway that encircles the city.

It is rare to encounter a film that is so attuned to the power of props, costumes, hairstyles and set design yet manages to feel effortlessly naturalistic. And it is rarer still to find a male director so invested in the interior lives of a class of usually cinematically invisible older women. But telling his story through Chela’s expressive, wounded eyes lends even more to the film than Brun’s remarkable debut turn, which somehow parlays her character’s timidity, her desire to disappear, her discomfort with her newly awakened desire, into real presence. In this performance of great subtlety and power, Chela, the aging lesbian cosseted by wealth and a committed but discreet monogamous relationship for decades, becomes a compelling metaphor for a generation of Paraguayans forged during the country’s repressive dictatorship, for whom the modern world, with all its benefits like social progress and its drawbacks like economic crisis, can seem as threatening as it is liberating.

With his exceptionally assured and beautifully crafted first film, Martinessi, compassionately and without judgment, looks to coax his country from the safe but darkened doorway of the past, out into the sunshine of the present and the uncertain weather of the future. Because despite all the privilege and entitlement implied by the term “heiress,” there’s no great value to an inheritance if all that’s passed on through the generations is crockery and shame. [B+]