In Gem Mantlethe debut feature of the director Natalia Lopez Gallardo –known for her extensive work as an editor on films such as helicopter either silent light– , an uncomfortable reality is exposed; known, but often invisible: that the perpetrators of crime and ordinary people coexist in the same spaces, establish relationships beyond violence, pass through the same places and that, on occasions, they are the same people.
Filmed during the dry season in the countryside of the state of Morelos, where the director has lived for 20 years, the film takes its name from a Buddhist expression, which affirms that reality is like a mantle of gems where one is reflected in the others. This kaleidoscopic evocation of reflections maintains a conceptual relationship with the work: a choral narration where the situation of each character is particular, but which resembles, in a certain way, that of the others.
Natalia López’s script follows three women who coincide in the same town: on the one hand, we have Isabel (Nailea Norvind), a white and privileged woman who returns to the house that her mother inherited when she died, located in a town in Morelos, and who is facing a divorce. On the other hand, there is María (Antonia Olivares), the house’s domestic worker, who is looking for her missing sister. The trio is completed by Roberta (Aída Roa), a local police officer who wants to keep her son away from the local cartel, while she observes the relationship between the judicial institution and the criminals.
With a faded and greyish photograph, which portrays the particular aridity of the center of the country, the film takes place between silences, long shots and the sordidness of an anecdote that, rather than unfolding in a narrative sense, is presented as a collage of a microuniverse in the one that everyone is involved in the cycle of violence that plagues the place and that is installed in the life of the town as a collective wound.
Close to the influence of the cinema of Carlos Reygadas (even in the use of non-actors), Gem Mantle won the Silver Bear at the last Berlinale and opens in Mexico as part of the competition of the Morelia International Film Festival.
You have commented that you did a fairly extensive synthesis process during the production, which lasted 4 years. How did you refine the elements, from the script to the editing, that allowed you to achieve that fragmented tone, not necessarily narrative, that you were looking for in the film?
Really, the films are built in layers, the decisions you make are the ones that gradually lead to a final result that was not exactly decided at the beginning, the objective is always revealed. Obviously there is a thematic force, a concept that drags you throughout the process and with which the elements and the final form will correspond, that is where they will have coherence with each other. What happened to me was that, in the research process, especially when I talked to people, I realized that it was a film about the collective, that it was not an anecdote about someone or that it touched on the manifestations of some particular violence, but it was something abstract, a wound.
At first I thought that this wound was inaccessible to me. When I saw, for example, the pain of the mother of a disappeared person, I was embarrassed to approach a subject of this magnitude. Later I realized that the Mexican reality, the reality of those of us who live in this territory, is quite complex, embedded in anthropological, spiritual, economic and political issues. Realizing that the theme I was looking for was abstract, made me build a film around the atmospheres and elements of cinematographic language, in the form. I believe that cinema has to go far beyond telling facts or building a story; it has to become an experience, one that is lived with the body.
You have mentioned that the narration is only one more of the elements that constitute the cinematographic work. What elements were indispensable, functional or useful to transmit this psychological life of violence? How did you capture the abstract with the material?
I believe that if we relate to reality as if things had a particular meaning, we limit it to a symbol, to a concept, when reality is indeterminate. The things that appear before us do not have a clear meaning, so you have to respect that and face situations, humans, or places and objects knowing that what you see does not have an intrinsic meaning. More so with a problem as complex as this, where you have to lower your head and realize that it is vaster than what you can say about it.
I gave a lot of importance to all the elements, both the actor who is manifesting himself in front of the camera, as well as the movement of the camera, the light, the dialogue or the sound. I think it’s similar to a sheet music, where all the notes are, but there is a moment when certain instruments stand out and others fall behind.
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In other statements you have said that you consider cinema more as an experience than as a tool. Do you think that Mexican cinema has placed more emphasis on the condition of cinema as a tool?
I think that there is effectively a diversion of the potentiality of cinematographic art. I think there is a fixation for the plot, for telling a story; literature is the right one for that, because it takes the word, which has a meaning, to create an image. Instead, cinema takes matter, which has no meaning and already has a form, like a human, an object or a tree, to create an idea, an experience, rather than tell a story.
It is also a symptom of the system in which we live, consumer capitalism. This system takes any expression and turns it into an entertainment product, albeit a vague definition of what that is; My 84-year-old grandmother and my 14-year-old son may like the same product. This speaks of a standardization in audiovisual manifestations that is going through the times we live in, where massive communication exercises do not necessarily mean having contact and lead to a kind of anxiety to know what is going to happen, already knowing in advance more or less what is going to happen, moreover. I think that we are immersed in a much poorer exercise. Today movies are seen with the head, forgetting that it is the body that lives the experience.
With this work you won the Silver Bear at the last Berlinale. On several occasions we see cases of films awarded by European audiences, which arrive in Mexico and are seen in a different way. What do you consider to be some factors that influence this phenomenon, in which differences are observed in the mobilization of audiences from one region to another?
It is difficult for a country with a purely Western cosmogony to translate the Mexican reality as we Mexicans translate it, since we have a cosmogony that is also indigenous; our complex reality is made up of both. That’s why I want to share so much gem cloak with the Mexican public, because obviously it will read differently; there are contradictions and ambiguities that are innate to our reality in Mexico. Here nothing is what it seems, everything has more meanings, you always have to look at things twice. For a European, who has a purely Western mentality, it is difficult to translate such a reality. Mexico is a very complex country, just like the tragedy that I try to approach here, so the experience is lived differently here and abroad.
What is the reading that you would like to observe in the Mexican public? What conversation do you think triggers Gem Mantle?
I think that there is no “public”, an “entity” so called, so to speak. I think that there are humans, each with a particular subjectivity. The great thing about a film is that it has an open nature, that it is like a vessel that is going to be filled with the subjectivity of many different people. So, I no longer hope that everyone can put her subjectivity into the film; perhaps it is not a work that is going to “take anyone by the hand”, but I am sure that it will give them a cinematographic experience.
Carlos Carrizales Communicologist. I learned to graduate in everything as an apprentice. Irredeemable cinephile, who can never see everything he wants. Also aspiring journalist. Lover of series, trova, and everything that implies discovering new things.