Heavy on Loachian social realism and undergirded by the intensity and heavy stakes of a Safdie Brothers flick, Juan Diego Botto’s gritty eviction thriller “On the Fringe” — produced by Penélope Cruz, who also lends her name to the billing sheet — makes for hard-hitting stuff. Premiering at the Venice Film Festival today in the Orrizonti section, here’s a slice of agitprop that feels as timely as ever, with the energy crisis surging across Europe, the costs of living rocketing from shore to shore, and society’s most marginalized left to pick up the tab.
Anyone with half a heart and half a brain will be quickly won over by its interweaving stories, following three different people in the same Spanish city living under the cold, foreboding shadow of red-stamp eviction notices: though a little baggy in the second act, the first and final thirty-minutes are appropriately earnest and affecting.
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Our story opens in a rundown apartment, where an alone little girl cuts her finger open with a bread knife. Soon after, the police arrive, looking for her absent mother: sensing something is awry, they take the tot back to the station to be looked after by child services (it’s a gut-punch of a sequence, the kid wailing in a series of close-ups as she’s carried out to the service wagon). Arriving just after the car departs is Rafa (Luis Tosar, broken, exhausted, and just fantastic) a good-hearted renter’s rights lawyer, giving chase to the car: not only does he know the kid’s mom, he’s too aware that if she doesn’t collect the girl by the end of the night, she’ll be taken in for custody by the state.
Rafa’s quest to find the girl’s mom — all while trying to fit in his obligations to his pregnant wife and increasingly distant stepson — makes for the central push of the story, with the other narrative branches intersecting in different ways. This is how we’re introduced to Cruz: Rafa is part of an anti-eviction collective organizing to stop her family from being chucked out on the street the following morning, escalating from protests at the local bank to direct action to stop their removal. Cruz is the obligatory big name here, the driver of interest at Venice and beyond, but Tosar is the real lynchpin: he packs a whole lotta cathartic welly into his performance of a man torn asunder by his duties as a husband, as a stepparent, and the weight of obligation on his shoulders to help the neediest. There’re a few days to go, but he’s one of the highlights of the festival so far.
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There’s also the quietly devastating story of an elderly woman trying to get in contact with her migrant son, so embarrassed by his work as an unskilled laborer that he dodges her calls. This one, told through a series of scenes depicting her hushed, seemingly put-together life in a cozy apartment, really starts to drag — until, as seems the habit of debut director Botto, there’s one hell of a tragic rug pull that kicks out your teeth. Though conventionally chronological and easy to follow, Botto and his script co-writer Olga Rodriguez deserve credit for linking up all of the narrative pieces in such an effective manner.
It’s a real heartbreaker, “On the Fringe,” working as a solemn tearjerker without trivializing the crucial political message at its core. Its closing title card makes a point of Spain’s one-hundred-plus evictions a day, a stat all the more devastating after the human effect has been dramatized, though you may be left in want of a little more fury. And perhaps it’s a reflection on the endlessness of the eviction epidemic — in Spain and across the globe, renters in London, New York, and beyond empathizing all too well with the plights of Botto’s subjects — but its final message of resistance, a literal freeze-frame of Cruz’s character…. well, resisting, may be a little trite for some. Whatever the case, here’s a picture with the best of intentions, even if the familial conflicts resulting from this terrible crisis have been readily explored in the cornucopia of social dramas before it. It’s well acted across the board, and who can fault a hot-button picture that sticks its finger up at landlords? [B-]
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