Our entrance into Sandra’s life is as unassuming as Sandra herself. We find ourselves on a bus traversing Medellín. Private vendors hawk their wares. Passengers come and go. There is little to signal that any one passenger is going to be our protagonist until the conductor invites Sandra to sit up front with him, unfastening the chain for her to enter the confines of his small domain. The conductor flirts with Sandra, addressing her with compliments and terms of affection, but this is Colombia, and men bestowing such attention on unaccompanied women is hardly unusual. Soon enough, Sandra will exit the bus and arrive at the shopping mall where she works as a security guard, pulling back her hair and wearing a uniform that renders her more or less part of the scenery. Nothing dramatic happens to Sandra at the mall, though she seems to make friends with a charming janitor who has a sideline selling lingerie and sex toys. The women go out for food and drink and have some laughs, then Sandra returns home to the apartment she shares with her son, Julián, who has arrived at that solipsistic stage of adolescence when everything is about oneself. The day passes.
Everything that transpires in these early scenes of Yennifer Uribe Alzate’s La piel en primavera is perfectly ordinary. Everything that transpires in these early scenes is captured with care and inquisitiveness, even tenderness, but without the gestures of cinematic showmanship you might expect in a feature directorial debut. This ordinary care and inquisitiveness is extremely important, because over the course of La piel en primavera, Sandra’s ordinary life will gradually become unmoored, drifting away from the script typically assigned to a working-class single mother. Sandra will go about her job responsibly. She will continue to try and be a good mother to Julián. She will date the conductor, who, it turns out, is also a single parent. Yet she will also do something rather radical: she will pursue sexual happiness on her own terms, reclaim her body and, along with it, a deeper sense of self and the ability to be fully present in the world.
La piel en primavera, which translates as “skin in spring,” is not the sort of feminist film that generates attention by bombarding you with stimuli. Which is to say, La piel en primavera is not The Substance, though it is a far more substantial film, and, if I may say so, it is also far more meaningfully feminist. It premiered in Berlin and eventually made its way to San Sebastián and to the Festival du nouveau cinema de Montréal, where I caught up with it by sheer chance. I mentioned that Uribe Alzate’s storytelling is almost tender, but it is also recursive, with certain scenes almost receding from view just as they draw us in. I think of the moment when Sandra and the conductor first make love on an out-of-serve bus at night. As in the opening scene, the camera largely keeps its distance, allowing action to play out un-intruded. By prompting us to lean in, such passages allow us to know Sandra in a far richer way than they would have if Uribe Alzate had chosen to loom over the copulating couple or scavenged Sandra’s face in close-up for reactions. The director trusts that meaning will be made in the distance between the action on display and our gaze.
Aside from the elegant observational style of Uribe Alzate and her cinematographer Luciana Riso Soto, Alba Liliana Agudelo Posada should be singled out for her immersive, quietly charismatic performance in the lead role. The excessive excitement Sandra feels when Julián invites his girlfriend over for a birthday gathering, the patience she cultivates while arousing herself in private moments, the almost palpable relief she feels when rediscovering female companionship, the way her posture refuses to shrink when she realizes she’d being neglected: Agudelo Posada embodies each of these transitions so seamlessly and so subtly that, to her credit, you may not notice them. Uribe Alzate, Riso Soto, and Agudelo Posada have made a film that is, alas, unlikely to generate much fuss in the current climate, but I hope each of them forges ahead with their good work, finding fresh ways to illuminate ordinary experience from within.
José Teodoro
© FIPRESCI 2024