I posted a Q & A about a new book on Argentina cinema, called the Directory of World Cinema: Argentina, edited by Spanish native Beatriz Urraca and American Gary M. Kramer.

I’m a contributor to the book, writing on and critiquing the film Mia, a tender story of a transgendered women in Buenos Aires directed by Javier van de Couter.

So you can get a better idea of the book’s contributions, with permission of the editors and University of Chicago Press, I am posting my review here, which appears on pages 161 and 162 in the Modern Families section of the book.

  What I found fascinating about Mia from a travel perspective is how, like many of the movies in the book, it shows you various sites in Buenos Aires and other parts of Argentina.  In Mia, they range from the Reserva Ecologica on the edge of downtown, to the MicroCentro to many other Buenos Airesneighborhoods.  The film also stars Rodrigo de la Serna who was in Motorcycle Diaries, about Argentina’s Che Guevara.

For more on the book and to order it, visit the University of Chicago Press.

Mia

Synopsis

Ale is a beautiful transgender cartonera who lives on the city’s edge, in a shantytown for the gay and transgender homeless called Aldea Rosa (Pink Village), located near the Ecological Reserve on the banks of the Río de la Plata. Ale gathers refuse and cardboard on the Buenos Aires streets to make a living. One night she sees 10-yearold Julia being forced back inside her house by the maid and her father, Manuel. The maid quits, and in frustration, the father throws a mysterious cardboard box into the trash.

Ale takes the box containing the personal effects of Mia, Julia’s mother. She tries to return it, only to be insulted by Manuel. However, she slowly befriends Julia. Although Manuel is prone to drunken rages, he realizes that he and Julia need Ale, who resembles Mia. After establishing a makeshift family, Ale experiences disappointment as Julia moves away, and additional stress when she returns to find her shantytown destroyed in a police raid. Through all the sadness, however, Ale’s eternal spirit gives her resiliency.

Critique

The directorial debut of actor Javier Van de Couter, Mia is perhaps the most sensitive depiction of two of Argentina’s most heavily abused communities: the cartoneros, who wander nocturnal Buenos Aires scavenging the detritus of the daytime city for discarded objects, cardboard and paper to resell as recycling, and the transgender community. Van de Couter’s direction of Sosa Villada, who plays Ale, exemplifies his sensitivity to transgender issues. She shows an exquisite range of emotion, from a sunny happiness regardless of her condition, to trepidation, to a motherly attitude. Ale clearly knows her place in the world, as much as she would like to change it. The film begins with her staring into a restaurant, watching a birthday celebration. She smiles at the scene, the window both a way to look in from the dark streets and a mirror to use to fix her hair, as if to maintain a beauty that could take her away from her circumstances. At the same time, the scene emphasizes her transgender nature, her large hands combing through her tresses.

Argentina’s more invisible social boundaries are also made apparent in the film. Finding Julia home alone, having injured herself trying to cook pancakes, Ale remains afraid to cross the house’s threshold; she has Julia bring her the material she needs to help her. As Julia, the young Lanata gives a performance that veers from rage-filled drama to nuanced sadness. She is especially strong in her role as caretaker of her alcoholic father, whom she often finds either asleep on the sofa or awake and violent. Lanata does well as the emotionally fraught daughter of a mother who committed suicide. She casually mentions this to Ale, a fact that her father has fooled himself into believing she did not know. That Julia is aware of Ale’s transgender status is also skillfully revealed under Van de Couter’s tender direction. Julia at one point asks if Ale is short for Alejandra when they first meet, aware of her female identity. But later she asks, ‘why do you speak like a woman?’, suggesting she knows Ale was born a man.

As Manuel, De la Serna is the film’s headliner in a role that throws him into drunken, homophobic rages with Ale and into sensitive moments with his daughter. His expression when he sees Ale wearing Mia’s dress is one of both longing and confusion, and a highlight in the film. Still, Manuel’s switch from angry to understanding seems to happen too quickly, along with his sudden ability to control his drinking. At the same time, De la Serna masterfully shows how confusing the situation is for him. At one point, he attacks Ale for playing with his daughter, and then begins to understand that she is valuable under the circumstances.

A subplot in Mia involves the slum residents divided between fighting for housing from the city or remaining as a shantytown. This pits Ale against many who prefer the latter option. A group of young men also come to make a documentary, a forced sequence that seems designed to reveal facts about their lives through the few questions they answer, but that could have been explained in other ways– especially since the young men try to help the residents throughout the film. That said, Mia’s overall gimmick – that a cartonera would want to return a personal object she found to a family – is a beautiful, believable narrative device.

Mia ends with a violent scene in which Ale comes home from her final visit with Julia and Manuel to find police beating the Aldea Rosa residents and driving a bulldozer through their homes. While this scene is based on the 1998 destruction of the gay shantytown ordered by a federal judge, as the film explains at the end, slum life here is romanticized. Yet Van de Couter tries to portray the idea that such places, scattered throughout Buenos Aires, as well as the people who live in them, are full of humanity, nuance and a deep desire for a better life that society feels they do not deserve. It is a striking point, well told.

Michael Luongo

 

Mia

Studio/Distributor:

Kairos Films

Director:

Javier Van de Couter

Producers:

Pablo Rovito

Fernando Sokolowicz

Angel Durandez

Screenwriter:

Javier van de Couter

Cinematographer:

Miguel Abal

Art Director:

Sebastián Rosés

Composer:

Iván Wyszogrod

Editor:

Fabio Pallero

Duration:

98 minutes

Cast:

Rodrigo de la Serna

Camila Sosa Villada

Maite Lanata

Rodolfo Prantte

Format:

Colour, 35mm

Year:

2011