argentinian movie Los Sonambulos by Paul Hernandez, a family drama discovered at Horizontes latinos in San Sebastian in 2019, has finally found a place on screens in France.
A sound of water, of cataracts… The mother, Luisa, wakes up in the sleeping house. She finds Ana, her teenage daughter, standing naked, sleepwalking. The next day, the family leaves to celebrate – as every year – the New Year in the large family house, in the countryside, by the swimming pool. A great classic in the bourgeoisie and in Argentine cinema. Around the supercharged matriarch, played by actress Marilú Marini, her three children, Luisa her daughter-in-law, Ana and her three cousins.
Sleepwalking, which gives the film its title, is a family defect, but except for the first crisis, that of Ana at the very beginning of the film, it is metaphorical here. It allows the director to instill a certain tension from the start, which will only increase throughout the film.
However, we are here in a wealthy, intellectual family – the deceased grandfather founded a publishing house in which all work – where we play at the table – children and parents – looking for the intruder: in all these writers, who is not Argentinian… A family that claims to be open and emancipated, but in which the flaws are gradually appearing.
The cheerfulness of the reunion is a little overplayed and under the exchanges – we are in Argentina, we talk a lot, loudly and the tone rises quickly -, in the looks, we guess tensions and unsaid things. The grandmother amputates with scissors the photos of people who are unsympathetic to her, starting with her ex-daughters-in-law. A grandmother who, to the great regret of the eldest son, wants to sell the family home so that she no longer has to take care of it – and turn the page on the past. Elijo, the young cousin, brings his share of mystery and trouble to the family climate.
Luisa and her daughter Ana – a sulky teenager – are the two protagonists of the film. The actress Erica Rivas, very present in Argentine cinema who was, among other things, the avenging bride of new savages by Damian Szifron, inhabits the role of Luisa with the intensity that we know from her. His character seeks his place in this endogamous and ultimately toxic family where “sleepwalking” is a form of maladjustment to the world. She wants to literally and virtually open the windows, to escape this imposed confinement. Even in the scenes “open” to the garden, the camera tightens the exchanges on the tensions. It is also the feeling of the spectator. Between La Cienaga by Lucrecia Martel and Feast by Thomas Vinterberg, in the prescience of the drama that we guess, we suffocate in the humidity of the Argentinian summer, until the moment when the family wakes up, brutally…