Architecture becomes a metaphor for the extreme economic and cultural differences ravaging Panama, and indeed most of Latin America today, in Abner Benaim’s Plaza Catedral. This is the first time that a film from Panama has made the shortlist as a contender for the best international film Oscar, though Benaim has two prior Oscar submissions under his belt, including a documentary about Panamanian singer and actor Ruben Blades. Here the plot initially seems predictable, juxtaposing the well-off professional Alicia and the young Chief, a Black teenager from the slums; it is very reminiscent of Walter Salles’s Central Station, set in Rio de Janeiro in 1998, which tracked the relationship between an older, educated woman and a street child. Benaim, who also wrote the screenplay, takes the premise a step further, depicting an increasingly violent environment that overwhelms any effort at kindness or redemption.
Panama City’s agglomeration of tall skyscrapers makes it resemble Dubai or Hong Kong. But next door the poor live in colorful squalor in the El Chorrillo hood, which American warplanes bombed in 1992 in order to arrest General Noriega. Benaim directed a documentary about that event, the aptly titled Invasion, in 2014. In Plaza Catedral he draws on his documentary skills to elicit a spontaneous performance from the remarkable Fernando Xavier De Casta as a 13-year-old boy of the streets who gets paid dolaritos for watching and washing cars parked near the cathedral.
But not only the U.S. dollar dominates Panamanian society. English words creep into the language, American junk food replaces traditional cuisine, and rich and poor alike mimic American lifestyles. Benaim makes ironic observations of such habits, adding layers of significance and commentary to the sequences that drive the story forward towards its tragic end.
Ilse Salas, a blue-eyed Mexican actress, plays Alicia, a divorced upper-class professional who is consumed by simmering grief after the accidental death of her six-year-old son. She is mistaken for a “gringa,” a foreigner or American, by the darker-skinned Panamanians. She has to explain her looks and accent, and try to remain stoic as she continues her life on autopilot. Her daily routines are interrupted by fantasies of plunging off buildings or having her throat cut, with painful flashbacks to her son’s accident, but she soldiers on despite the heartless rejection of her ex-husband and the demands of her boss at an architecture firm. Her empty, guilt-stricken life is suddenly filled with drama when Chief appears bleeding on her doorstep, and her smothered instincts kick in. The sustained “Pas de Deux” scene where Alicia and the boy finally reveal some truths to each other is shot in closeup profile, the camera held still against a white wall. We feel trapped in that tight space with the two superb actors, who won well-deserved Best Acting awards at the Guadalajara Film Festival. Another harrowing and effective scene has Alicia visit the city morgue, where she silently inspects the corpses of young victims of violence.
Benaim himself takes a satiric turn as an actor, playing Alicia’s boss with gleeful gusto. Amusingly, he uses Americanized catchphrases like “Barefoot Lifestyle” and “Soho Chic” to spur on her sale of yet another towering high-rise. It is a scene worthy of Luis Buñuel’s Exterminating Angel, as the wealthy find themselves trapped in their soaring ivory towers, looking down on the teeming poor.
Music also becomes a vehicle for exposing class differences, as Chief demands that Alicia replace the melancholic jazz piano gracing her apartment with the banging rhythms of Reggaetón. Food, likewise, sets them apart. She serves him homemade salads; he longs for greasy pizza. These details are blended into the script in understated ways and the acting is also restrained, avoiding bathos, and adding some humor to the narrative.
Ambient sound at times can be overwhelming, like the rainstorm that accompanies the hushed confessions in a revelatory, almost mother-son dialogue between Alicia and Chief. At other times it provides added layers of understanding, as when the cacophony of the El Chorrillo streets is contrasted to the eerily silent offices high above the street noise.
Outstanding films have been made in Latin America to depict the harsh life of street children, from Luis Buñuel’s merciless classic The Forgotten Ones, shot in Mexico in 1950, to Victor Gaviria’s The Rose Seller, set in Medellin, in Colombia, in 1998. It is worth noting that several of the young non-pro actors died violent deaths in real life after The Rose Seller premiered. In Plaza Catedral’s closing credits we learn that Fernando Xavier de Casta, the young lead, was killed in a street gang shoot-out even before Plaza Catedral was completed. It is a telling, devastating statement that amply justifies the film’s cool, clinical analysis of the distorted values that drive contemporary society, in Panama as elsewhere.
Director, screenplay: Abner Benaim
Cast: Ilse Salas, Fernando Xavier de Casta, Manolo Cardona
Producers: Abner Benaim, Matthias Ehrenberg, Ruben Sierra Salles, Carlos Garcia, Maria Alejandra Mosquera, Jose Cohen
Cinematography: Lorenzo Hagerman
Production design: Coca Olderigo
Editing: Soledad Salfate
Music: Matthew Herbert
Sound: Carlos Garcia
Production companies: Apertura Films (Panama), Barracuda Films (Mexico), Blond Indian Films (Colombia)
World sales: Luminosity Entertainment, Gulfstream Pictures
Venue: FICG (Mezcal)
In Spanish
94 minutes
