Close and deadly mother-daughter relationships have been a recurrent theme at San Sebastian this year, from Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s cold-blooded mother seeking revenge for her young daughter’s death at the hands of a serial killer in Serpent’s Path to The Red Virgin, based on a true story in which a woman conceives a baby she grooms to change the world through social reform, and when disappointment sets in, murders the girl.
In Maybe It’s True What They Say About Us, playing in the Horizontes Latinos section of the festival, Ximena (Chilean actress Aline Kuppenheim) is a divorced psychiatrist who has moved to Latin America with her two daughters, where she lives a comfortable life on a leafy street with the teenage Ada (Julia Lubert). She has had little contact with her elder offspring Tamara (Camila Roeschmann) since she joined a sect and became the girlfriend of its charismatic leader Raul, who is sadly never seen in the film.
One day Tamara reappears before her a changed woman: sharp-edged, secretive and more than a little crazy. You would think a psychiatrist could coax some facts out of her, at least an emotional outburst. But no, Tamara submits to her mother’s forty questions with downcast eyes and says absolutely nothing – much to the frustration of those members of the audience who would like to see the plot move on. They have to wait for the police to ring the doorbell and slowly but surely bring their net down around the girl. She is charged with a heinous crime: killing her newborn daughter by throwing her into a bonfire on Raul’s orders.
Maybe it’s true? Actually, there’s never any doubt Tamara played a role in the infanticide. What torments her mother is why she allowed it to happen. In court, all the extenuating circumstances are paraded before the judge – the young women in the sect were constantly drugged, raped, beaten and brainwashed. Witnesses testify that Raul was expecting the birth of an androgynous being who would change the world, as the Red Virgin was supposed to do in another film. When he saw he had a normal daughter, he had her burned alive as “the Abomination”. But none of this answers Ximena’s anguished question.
Co-directed by Chilean filmmakers Camilo Becerra (El último sacramento) and Sofía Paloma Gómez (Quiero morirme dentro de un tiburón), Maybe It’s True bounces the story off a juicy premise taken from reality, then hovers in a no-man’s-land between a mother-daughter drama and a horror film. In support of the latter is Pablo Mondragon’s haunting score that uses distorted choruses of female voices in a vaguely Gothic chant. Adding a bit of police procedural to the mix is a police reconstruction of the fatal bonfire, in which the members of the sect are made to reenact the murder at the place where it happened. For Tamara it is a harrowing experience that triggers a climactic confrontation with her mother and a well-turned surprise ending.
The three actresses are well-cast, particularly Kuppenheim who, very much in character, keeps wandering into intellectual theorizing when she talks about her daughter’s case. But the story as told has little momentum. At times it seems like a Simenon novel where the point is not to advance the investigation into a crime, but to describe the atmosphere around it and the details of the characters’ lives, while Maigret thoughtfully consumes a great deal of alcohol. In this case Ximena opts for large glasses of wine and downs pills by the handful. But she is no detective, and a tale as disturbing as this leaves a bad taste in the mouth.
Directors, screenplay: Sofía Paloma Gómez, Camilo Becerra
Cast: Aline Küppenheim, Julia Lübert, Camila Roeschmann
Producers: Gabriela Sandoval, Carlo Nunez
Cinematography: Manuel Rebella
Editing: Valeria Racioppi
Music: Pablo Mondragon
Sound: Juan Carlos Maldonado
Production companies: Storyboard Media (Chile), La Jauria Comunicaciones (Chile), Murillo Cine (Argentina), Morocha Films (Argentina), B-Mount Film (Spain)
World Sales: Meikincine Entertainment (Argentina)
Venue: San Sebastian International Film Festival (Horizontes Latinos)
In Spanish, French
95 minutes
