Forever Your Maternal Animal

From Viennale

In the opening scene of SIEMPRE SOY TU ANIMAL MATERNO, Elsa (Daniela Marín) makes her way to her family home in Costa Rica after living in Belgium for several years. The sound design is a frenetic mélange of jazzy trumpets and screeching car horns as the camera whips through the packed streets of San José, crash zooming onto a pair of sneakers hanging on a power line and then tracking into a line of misogynistic graffiti. The atmosphere is woozy and panicked; not just because Costa Rica is far more chaotic than sleepy Belgium, but also because the extent of her family’s dysfunction borders on the surreal. Elsa’s mother (Marina de Tavira, from ROMA (2018)) is a self-involved writer preparing to debut a reedited collection of erotic poetry she wrote in her twenties, while her equally bohemian father (Reinaldo Amién) occupies himself with young lovers around Elsa’s age. The most worrisome case is her younger sister Amalia (Mariangel Villegas), a fake-news conspiracist, radical feminist and devout Christian, whose deepest spiritual connection, she insists, is her old nanny. With wry, deadpan humour, Costa Rican-French filmmaker Valentina Maurel sketches a crooked family portrait about the limits of our ability to fix those whom we love. (Beatrice Loayza)