Writer-director Nayra Ilic Garcia has great empathy for her teenage protagonist Celeste, living comfortably with her fun-loving, pot-smoking archaeologist parents in 1990’s Chile. When a tragedy strikes and alters the family dynamics, she is lost and bewildered. It may not be much of a plot for a feature film, and this is a particularly leisurely one filled with slow and empty moments of adolescent angst and ennui. But the young lead Helen Mrugalski is arresting in her headstrong urge for independence that pushes the limits of her age, and the Alcantara desert resonates with buried meaning.
Cuerpo celeste (literally, heavenly body) is the second feature directed by Nayra Ilic Garcia after her 2011 debut Metro cuadrado. It has been making the rounds of festivals, winning a special mention at Tribeca and earning a spot in San Sebastian’s prestigious Horizontes Latinos.
The one great, silent character that appears in every scene is the mighty desert that caresses the Chilean coast. A long, deserted beach of sand dunes introduces Celeste, her family and friends at play, frolicking in the water with the carefree, self-centered entitlement of children. It’s the last day of the year and the adults are stoned, leaving Celeste and two local boys to enjoy themselves splashing in the water, ignoring warnings to be careful of riptides. That note of danger, reinforced by the music and joking references to the word “dark”, has to lead somewhere. Unexpectedly, it is Celeste’s beloved father who dies, in a sudden and irrevocable moment, banally playing paddle ball.
After this shock, the story becomes more atmosphere than incident. Celeste shuffles from her aunt (Mariana Loyola) to her mother (played by Daniela Ramirez, who starred in the surreal Zafari), and who is trying to sell their remote desert house after putting her late husband’s things in order. These include 7-million year old fossilized whale bones and sharks’ teeth which they casually removed from the sand and rock of the desert.
But there are artifacts of human life hidden there, too. Ilic Garcia is not the first to point out a connection between the buried fossils in the ancient desert and the recent human remains added by the Pinochet regime, which disappeared its opponents and buried many under the sands. There are certainly deliberate echoes here of Chilean filmmaker Patricio Guzman and his stunning 2010 documentary Nostalgia for the Light, though little of the master’s magical atmosphere. Still, Sergio Armstrong’s camerawork is graced with awe-inspiring images of the starry night sky and the oddly human desert formations, while Celeste’s growing pains are punctuated by radio announcements about Pinochet and his cabinet. She finally learns the meaning of the police tape around random spots in the desert where bodies have resurfaced. One wonders whether these macabre digs, which have just risen into Celeste’s adolescent consciousness, will illuminate her life in some way, perhaps drawing her out of her sulky self-centeredness and refusal to communicate with her family.
Director, screenwriter: Nayra Ilic Garcia
Producers: Luigi Chimienti, Alessandro Amato, Florencia Rodriguez, Dominga Ortuzar
Cast: Helen Mrugalski, Daniela Ramírez, Nicolás Contreras, Néstor Cantillana, Mariana Loyola
Cinematography: Sergio Armstrong
Production design: Natalia Geisse
Editing: Valeria Hernandez
Music: David Tarantino
Sound: Peter Rosenthal
Production companies: Planta, Horamagica in association with Disparte, Oro Films
World sales: Intramovies
Venue: San Sebastian Film Festival (Horizontes Latinos)
In Spanish
100 minutes
