Argentine writer-director Paula Hernández likes to explore what happens when characters from different worlds are thrown together. In her latest, “The Sleepwalkers,” which world-premiered in Toront…
Argentine writer-director Paula Hernández likes to explore what happens when characters from different worlds are thrown together. In her latest, “,” which world-premiered in Toronto’s Platform competition before moving on to San Sebastian, the focus is on a discontented mother and her sullen, newly pubescent teen daughter, as they spend a New Year’s holiday in close quarters with three generations of extended family from the patriarchal side.
Hernández is particularly good at capturing the fraught relationship between the protective Luisa and the moody adolescent. Ana cruelly rejects her mother’s attentions while staring raptly at her pinging cellphone, and then turns to her father for the permissions that Luisa has denied her. Meanwhile, as the cousins go tramping in the woods and swimming in the stream, Ana uses her phone to take photos of Alejo’s lithe naked body.
In contrast, the ever-watchful Luisa, continually finds herself smoothing hurt feelings here, sorting out the baby there, and helping elderly housekeeper Hilda with the management of the house and the meals. Even though she’s running behind on her work as a translator for the family’s literary publishing business and would really like some time for herself in order to work on her own writing, her maternal instincts are on overdrive, as she senses some threat to Ana.
Australia Latest News, Australia Headlines
Similar News:You can also read news stories similar to this one that we have collected from other news sources.
Toronto Film Review: ‘David Foster: Off the Record’By the early 1970s, as the counterculture was dissolving and reconfiguring, there were new pop-star archetypes on the horizon that we still tend to think of — the glam rocker, the sensitive singer-…
Read more »
Toronto Film Review: ‘The Moneychanger’Uruguayan auteur Federico Veiroj (“The Apostate,” “Belmonte”) broadens his usual intimate dramatic scope to diminishing returns for his fifth feature, “The Moneychanger,” . Adapted from a novella b…
Read more »
Toronto Film Review: ‘The Sky is Pink’Shonali Bose’s much-laureled 2014 “Margarita with a Straw” was a film whose presentation of a cerebral palsy-afflicted heroine sidestepped all the usual hand-wringing inspirational clichés of disab…
Read more »
Toronto Film Review: ‘There’s Something in the Water’Since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, the unpleasant sights, smells and pollutants of industry have typically been located where the poor folk dwell, and police society needn’t notice. …
Read more »
That's a Wrap: Toronto International Film Festival Recap | V Magazine
Read more »
Film Review: ‘Rambo: Last Blood’Home has always been an abstract concept for John Rambo, which is what the last scene of 2008’s otherwise expendable “Rambo” sequel finally gave the iconic Sylvester Stallone character: a moment wh…
Read more »