TOTEM

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Storyline (warning: spoilers)

Tótem is a dazzling, vibrant child’s-eye view of jubilation and tragedy. Lila Avilés’s latest film is filtered largely through the perspective of a seven-year-old girl who experiences the ups and downs of life in a day with her big and beautiful family. No one grows up in one day; on the other hand, maybe it happens in an instant. Towards the end of Lila Avilés’s exuberantly lovely Tótem, there’s an unearthly moment – made all the eerier in a film otherwise raucous with the rattle of real life – that suggests as much. Seven-year-old Sol (a wonderful Naíma Sentíes) looks up from her father’s blazing birthday cake, suddenly sombre, suddenly still. There are many ways to read it, but Sol’s gaze has a strange and profound effect on our very sense of the film, telescoping all the vitality of this crowded, clattering day into a held breath.
The occasion is a party being thrown for Tona (Mateo García Elizondo), Sol’s artist father, who is dying. The choral impression is of liveliness and good humour, but there’s an undertow of sorrow: the collective helplessness of all the people who love Tona knowing they cannot love him back to life. Adults dip down into Sol’s field of vision with expressions bursting with concern. In her earshot, Tona’s siblings speak in a code to prevent her hearing ugly words like ‘chemotherapy’. But they are also often distracted, and Sol has time to herself, waiting patiently at Dad’s door only to be gently turned away again, and, after one rebuff too many, retreating under a counter where she can cry quietly and ask Siri all the questions no one else will answer.
Sol only cries that once; viewers might not be capable of such restraint. And yet the film is nothing so manipulative as a tearjerker, with Avilés’s exceptional direction keeping sentimentality at bay while still, sampling the different flavours of grief that run like currents between the members of this close-knit, bickering family. Perhaps this is the moment that Sol grows up, when she realises that however strong your bonds of affection, there are some ways we will always be alone: everyone’s battered hearts beat and break at different speeds.