The opening of this film sets a wistful tone by using nice ambient music and lots of poetic images of the settings and characters - it felt slightly reminiscent of the opening of The Thin Red Line or Days of Heaven by Terence Malick or moments of Aguirre by Werner Herzog - high praise indeed. Throughout there was a multitude of delicately composed imagery. From the nice opening shot on a beach at night with police lights illuminating a lone figure sat on the sand, to a few frames of partial images lit up shrouded in darkness.
The film follows the joined lives of two racially and socio economically opposing families. One is wealthy and seems somewhat isolated - they have a daughter Sara. The other includes a loving mother Yarisa, who is employed as the maid to tend to the house. Sara and Yarisa share an incredibly close, mother-daughter like bond, so much so there seems to be not entirely unexpected tension between Sara and Yarisa's actual daughter, althought they are friends who share a night out. We see a 4 year old Sara stay submerged in a bath for minutes, she says in narration this is her favourite place - a plot point which will provide very satisfactory detail to the story very late on.
A hit and run accident takes the life of Yarisa's daughter Mallory late one night. There is much more to this event but I won't give too much away. The important thing is that on that night, Yarisa lost two daughters. A few hours later she goes to the beach and breaks down, calling for Sara. In a moment of extremely clever writing and shooting, Sara is in her favourite place, almost waiting for her - it is a great moment of character set up coming full circle (this is without doubt my favourite moment of all of the CIFF films so far this year)
This is the kind of memorable filmmaking that uses ample technical craft and accomplished performances to great dramatic effect, making it more impressive than entertaining - which is not a criticism.
SPOILERS;
The goat was a bad omen. They can often represent evil or satanic forces in literature or other films - in this one may be more simply they represent ill fate or death. The very last thing we see may suggest that Sara won't come back from her next dip - suggesting that she can't live with the guilt - not just directly for causing the death, but for destroying the life or her spiritual mother. I love this kind of commitment to visual symbolism.
4 out of 5
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