'Geminis' by Albertina Carri

Since fully entering the London rat race I have come across a number of 30-somethings that appear to feel rather bitter about being around 20-somethings, much to the bewilderment of the latter.  It is these people that will perhaps scoff at the idea that there is a big leap between being 21 and 24, crying that it is all within the same degree of naivety, but I can vouch for this leap when remembering  my reaction towards Albertina Carri’s Los Rubios, released in 2003 and one of the first films I saw during my first period of living in Buenos Aires.
 

At that time I was finding out about the military dictatorship that went on in Argentina in the 70’s, and what with being an opinionated 21 year old and coming from a tiny island with a prissy blank dictatorship record, I was horrified and indignant about any individual takes on the atrocity.  I instantly thought Carri’s partly animated documentary-style film based on her memories of her parents’ experiences during that era distasteful, and I haughtily left before the film ended.  How embarrassing to remember it now!  It is only from watching her latest film, Geminis, that I have sheepishly turned to look at this director more closely, after snootily discarding my first introduction to her work.

Albertina Carri

The film spans a few days of the lives of an affluent middle-class family from Buenos Aires and it is immediately clear that subtleties are left at the door when projecting the personalities of the family members.  Lucía, the painted mother, incessantly chatters superficial nonsense to her silent and brooding husband, Daniel, whilst chirpily recalling her flirtatious youth.  (She is also a frightening replica of my first landlady out there and therefore more than believable a character).  The two adolescent children, Jeremías (Jere) and Meme, are both sullen and tempestuous, and tend to flop about the house half-naked with a scornful curled lip.  The eldest sibling, Ezequiel, has returned to Argentina from Spain with his waif-like chain-smoking Spanish wife to marry once again for his parents’ sake at the family’s country quinta.  Auntie and grandmother, Lucía’s sister and mother respectively, are also strangely brought in at times in curious scenes involving the three of them that appear to not only hint at Lucía’s privileged upbringing and spoilt nature but also suggest that the inevitable blow will be far too much for her to comprehend.

At first the plot was rather slow to take off, and seemed too obvious to be all that we’d be offered.  The lingering saucy smiles that Jere and Meme threw to and fro gave their incestuous relationship away not long into the film.  There would clearly be a build up to their being discovered, a big family scene with much Latin screaming and tears, and up roll the credits.  Sighing wearily, I shuffled about in my seat and thought about what to have for dinner.  I had noticed the appalling script, the stilted lines, the clichés rolling off their tongues, it was all just too bad… Suspiciously bad.  I have seen with my own eyes the seemingly untrue good looks of many Argentinians, but to have a skulking Adonis making eyes at his good-looking boyish sister, and the older dark-haired brother swooping in from Spain to make up the ludicrously attractive trio, it was all too much.  Had I been in England for too long to believe this to be realistic?

The cars rolling into the grassy drive on the wedding day could have been mistaken for a Dolmio advert.  This idea of a bourgeois Latin-rooted family was being satirised loudly by the director, surely?  The inclusion of an overtly dramatic television scene from a Venezuelan soap opera made up my mind.  The very idea of two siblings joyfully copulating under their mother’s judgemental and controlling nose was laughable in fact, as she gaily left the house to go and crow over her timid friend’s interior décor…  The classic line of “Mum’s gone out, shall we use her jacuzzi?”.

Also for the audience’s amusement (surely?), were scenes such as that of Jere walking out beneath the trees by the country house in slow motion, bottom lip hanging as he bats out his frustration against the weeping branches, a young Greek god who hasn’t gotten his way.  His adoring sister watches from the window, heart strings a tangled incestuous mess, whilst their older brother is seen disapprovingly watching the pained twosome in the window’s reflection.

What was truly appealing in the film’s make-up was the lighting and camera work by Guillermo Nieto.  The opening close-up shots of blood being extracted from an arm; later on of glass being hoovered up; and towards the end Meme’s feet, heavy with dread, walking back to her familial nightmare after quietly crying, crouched and camouflaged at the foot of a tree.  The contrast between the seemingly satirical approach to a middle-class porteño family drama and the occasional shots which reached out and gently brushed one’s cheek, causing seconds of pleasant surprise, was altogether unusual and called for the audience to repeatedly sit up and pay attention.

The finale was indeed the shocking one that was expected all along, its crucial timing spot-on.  Yet another erotically charged sex scene between brother and sister was this time gapingly watched by their mother.  Brilliantly played by Cristina Banegas, Lucía’s slow hobbling up the stairs and her equally slow and stupid bewilderment at the loud gruntings coming from somewhere in the house caused a suitably sickening rise in the stomach.  Her eventual gut-wrenching scream is a prelude to the sticky mess of naked siblings and mother falling onto each other in stupefied horror.  Despite the pokings of fun at the whipped up melodrama of a middle-class Argentinian family, the realisation of full-blown incest being carried out was as hard-hitting as it should and could have been.

Cycling home afterwards, spurned on by hunger, the scenes flickered through my mind and I reached the conclusion that Carri had neatly dabbled in satire, visually appealing camera work and a taboo subject without overdoing any of the three.  Again, and this time I am able to see it as such, it was a unique take on a subject that many a director might beat to a pulp for the want of shocking and baffling the audience.  Who knows, give me another three years and I might be stomping out of the cinema again, but Geminis was undoubtedly entertaining enough to keep my mind off dinner and my bottom firmly in my seat.