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Channeling Margaret Mead
“Totem,” the second full-length feature from award-winning actress and director Lila Avilés, opens with an extraordinary scene in the cinema verité mode: a mother and 7-year-old daughter Sol (Naíma Sentíes), the latter the focus of the film, in a small public restroom. Sol is seated on the only toilet, stubbornly but with good humor refusing to give it up to her mother (Iazua Larios), who needs to pee—badly. Charming and charismatic, and tolerant in a bemused way of her willful (yet precociously aware) daughter, the mother—as both laugh—makes do with the sink.
Right, from the top, 7-year-old Sol (Naíma Sentíes), her aunts Nuri (Montserrat Marañon) and Alejandra (Marisol Gasé), and a caretaker, Cruz (Teresa Sánchez). Each finds her own way of understanding Sol's father's crippling illness.
The scene is both important and misleading. It’s important because Sol is at the center of the film’s emotional core, and she’ll play that role in the absence of her mother—until, fresh from “the theater,” her mother reappears in the film’s final minutes. The opening sequence demonstrates just how important the mother is and emphasizes the little girl’s alone-ness as she navigates a traumatic life event.
It's misleading because, although the film continues in the verité style—the hand-held camera, an under-the-table shot, that “who’s who?” feeling, a claustrophobic setting—the next 45 minutes will try your patience. Unless, that is, you enjoy watching people shower, bang on the bathroom door, dye their hair, obsess over this and that, and irritate each other time and again as they prepare (or don’t) for the party that will take place that evening. The Margaret Meads among us will revel in the sociology (or anthropology). Others will be tempted to look for another film to stream.
Above, Nuri (Marañon) and Alejandra (Gasé) argue out
their different ways of dealing with their brother's illness.
Fortunately, “Totem” gets “better.” As we’ll learn (a bit late), the party is ostensibly a birthday party for Tona (Mateo Garcia), Sol’s father, who is mostly bedridden, in crippling pain, and at risk of dying of cancer—the health problems of this family are legion. The backyard celebration, attended by Tona’s friends, teachers, colleagues, and relatives, is at once poignant and tragic, a credible and touching (capped by Sol’s lip-sync, operatic performance) pre-mortem memoriam in which everyone is saying “goodbye.”
The film uses the large, middle-class, Mexican family to show how differently people—from the preoccupied grandfather to the lazy teens—may understand, absorb, and manage the serious illness of a loved one.
More broadly, the film uses the large, middle-class, Mexican family to show how differently people—from the preoccupied grandfather to the lazy teens—may understand, absorb, and manage the serious illness of a loved one. One of the sisters does so by insisting on throwing the party in the first place, then by orchestrating the preparations to excess. Another sister, Nuri (Montserrat Marañon), expresses her grief and anxiety by baking, re-baking, and obsessively decorating (never finishing) the birthday cake, by drinking too much, and by refusing to attend the celebration. Cruz (Teresa Sánchez), a hired caretaker who has been attending to Tona’s needs for some time, who has been responsible for getting him ready to appear, and who could be taken for a member of the family, wants to leave with her back pay.
In another undertaking that would have intrigued Mead, “Totem” explores the juncture between the modern and the folk.
In another undertaking that would have intrigued Mead, “Totem” explores the juncture between the modern and the folk. The siblings understand rationally that Tona’s condition requires standard medical intervention, whether morphine or chemotherapy. At the same time, they engage in, and accept the possible efficacy of, exorcism and something dubbed “quantum therapy.” The fiery sky lantern that caps the evening’s events suggests a willingness to employ hopeful symbolism with religious overtones.
Left, Sol (Sentíes) uses the animal world, here, a snail, to understand vulnerability and fragility.
Sol has been a bored observer of the preparations for the festivities, but she is not without resources to deal with what is happening. She is fond of animals—bugs, insects, snails she finds on the back-yard plants—and she uses that world, and its life cycle, to understand the vulnerability and fragility that have made an invalid and recluse of her young father, as well as the possibility of non-existence. The look on her face as she accepts that no wish made over birthday candles will heal her father captures a maturity beyond her years—something both admirable and sad.
Sol (Sentíes), above, understands a wish on birthday candles
won't bring her father back to good health.
That first scene is a treasure, and there’s much to appreciate in the final half of this film, Mexico’s submission for the 2024 Best International Feature Film Oscar (it was not nominated). What’s in between can be tedious, and you may be tempted to surf the internet or—heaven forbid—watch the Olympics. Or you can sit tight and imagine you’re sharing a bowl of popcorn with Margaret Mead.
Date: 2024 (US release)
Director: Lila Avilés
Starring: Naíma Sentíes, Iazua Larios, Montserrat Marañon, Mateo Garcia, Teresa Sánchez
Country: Mexico
Language: Spanish, with English subtitles
Runtime: 95 minutes
Other Awards: 20 wins and 44 other nominations
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