It’s a reliable arthouse rule of thumb that putting any scrappily appealing kid in the path of any sour, set-in-their-ways adult character will eventually yield a thaw — and, if the filmmakers get the tone just right, a full-waterworks crowdpleaser in the vein of “Cinema Paradiso,” “Kolya” or “Central Station.” The fifth feature from stylish Mexican miniaturist Fernando Eimbcke, “Flies” could be said to follow that rule, as it contrives to bring together a lonely, arcade game-obsessed nine-year-old boy and an independent sixtysomething woman amid trying, potentially tragic circumstances. But if “Flies” is familiar in many senses, it’s too warmly and honestly felt to feel formulaic, and while its young lead Bastian Escobar is winsome as can be, the film is colored by a deeper melancholy that staves off cutesiness.
Premiering in competition at the Berlin Film Festival — his first film to do so since his sophomore effort “Lake Tahoe” in 2008 — “Flies” continues a welcome return to activity for its writer-director, who ended a 12-year hiatus from feature filmmaking with last year’s Plan B-produced coming-of-ager “Olmo.” That film was both thoroughly winning and a little slight, and while “Flies” is equivalently modest in form and scope, its emotional connections and consequences sit a little heavier in the heart, and linger longer in the mind. A performance of grave containment and gradually unlocked good humor from the great Teresita Sánchez (“The Chambermaid,” “Dos estaciones”), meanwhile, anchors the unassuming drollness of Eimbcke’s filmmaking.
She plays Olga, an unattached retiree with only occasional reason to leave her small, orderly two-bedroom apartment in a large Mexico City block. Hints abound in her living space of a past life that was less solitary, but she seems calmly resigned to her fixed, ordinary routine — save for her regular fits of irritation at the flies that buzz aggravatingly around her living room all day, as demonstrated in the film’s witty, wordless opening scene. Times are lean, however, and she takes the reluctant step of advertising a spare room to rent for some extra income.
Enter energetic young Cristian (Escobar) and his weary-faced father (Hugo Ramírez), unworldly out-of-towners in need of temporary accommodation near the city hospital where the boy’s mother is undergoing long-term cancer treatment. Cristian, whose wide-eyed perspective the film largely assumes, is still young enough to believe people only go to hospital to get better, though the more we learn of his mother’s plight — the hesitant stalling of hospital staff, the pained silences and absences of his father — the clearer it becomes that he’s in for a jolting end of innocence. For now, his anxieties are managed with imagination and play: In particular, a quaintly two-bit arcade game outside a local convenience store fills a lot of empty, unsupervised hours.
Quiet and houseproud, Olga has no intention of renting the room to families. Cristian’s desperate father smuggles him in after posing as a single lodger — a scheme that she quickly rumbles, giving the pair a few days to make alternative plans. When Dad finds much-needed casual employment, however, she’s put in the position of child-minder whether she likes it or not, and her carefully maintained distance from the outside world is shortened. Viewers may surmise from early visual cues why she’s loath to make such human bonds, though the script — by the director, with Vanesa Garnica — doesn’t over-egg or over-explain, instead finding poignant meaning in material objects: the jigsaw puzzles and board games in her spare-room cupboard, or a salsa CD hauled out for a rare spin.
Shooting in the same crisp, silvery monochrome that Eimbcke chose for his 2007 debut “Duck Season,” DP María Secco deftly contrasts the curtained, mollified light of Olga’s apartment with the dry, bleached afternoon glare on the sidewalks outside — making a tranquil if not altogether blissful sanctuary of this boxy, unremarkable interior. Sound designer Javier Umpierrez does something similar with the relentless chatter of the city streets, held at bay by Olga’s fly-trapping windows. The jangling bleeps and bloops of the arcade game, meanwhile, come to form a score of sorts, a sonic diversion from the real world closing in on Cristian.
A first-timer and a genuine find, Escobar plays the lad with utterly natural restlessness and ingenuity, swinging erratically — as kids that age so often do — between nagging curiosity about the world around him and equally exasperating disengagement. But if he holds the camera’s gaze with unpractised ease, he grows into a tenderly attentive scene partner for Sánchez, who’s equally delicate and generous in mapping out Olga’s various interior defenses and the traumas behind them, and the latent, involuntary caring instinct that Cristian sparks in her. “Flies” neither writes nor observes these two haphazardly paired souls as an offbeat odd couple for primarily comic purposes. Rather, it works patiently and compassionately to show how how similar they are, across divides of generation and circumstance, and what solace they can briefly find in each other.
English (US) ·