18.04.2013

Film review: Saying a final goodbye

Jim Moody reviews, Dominga Sotomayor (director) 'Thursday till Sunday', general release

Whatever pressures sunder couples’ relationships, the subtle effect on young children has rarely been better illustrated than by Dominga Sotomayor in her debut feature, Thursday till Sunday (De Jueves a Domingo). Sotomayor, who also wrote the screenplay, may be portraying a Chilean domestic drama, but it clearly holds lessons of a universal story.

In particular, this family of four’s holiday excursion by car to Chile’s north is tellingly laid out to a large extent through the eyes of elder child Lucia (Santi Ahumada), aged just 10. Indeed, those engaging aspects of the film that are most charming are exactly the perspectives of the two children; the other is seven-year-old Manuel (Emiliano Freifeld).

Quite obviously, childhood is no age of innocence, including for the most sheltered or pampered. Nor do we need to see children as small adults, in the manner of Victorians, in order to comprehend even extreme variations from what all of us have experienced. But the farewell to a unified nuclear family that is Thursday till Sunday sensitively shows how the truths of its collapse are read even by its youngest members. Both of these young actors, first-timers as they appear here, impressed audiences when the film was first shown in the UK at the 56th BFI London Film Festival last autumn.

From the opening fixed shot, as Lucia awakens in the family home in Santiago de Chile and the parents load up the car in the early morning, the child’s perspective is crucial. She and her brother pick up on the gradually more diverging hopes and reasons for the trip, as the journey unfolds. Their parents, Ana (Paola Giannini) and Papá (Francisco Pérez-Bannen), imagine they hold their gradual falling apart close to their chests, that their frequent guarded asides to one another are impenetrable. How wrong they are.

Out of sight in the back seat of the car, the two children gaze out the window or otherwise amuse themselves. But all the while they are absorbing information from their parents, who fail to realise how readable their ‘covert’ verbal and body languages really are. Parental snap and crackle cannot be hermetically sealed off.

Papá is intent on rediscovering a scrubby piece of northern land that his father may once have owned, something that becomes almost obsessive, as the enforced proximity to his wife works on the evident cracks in their marriage. Ana, on the other hand, imagines that it is just this physical closeness that is going to decisively heal the breach between them. The mismatch in the couple’s relationship equals mismatched expectations of the trip.

Even the manner of settling down for the night in a motel - who sleeps where - betrays the tensions that appear all too evidently to be waxing rather than waning. And when they come upon acquaintances at a campsite things become more fraught: Ana cheers up markedly in company of single dad Juan (Jorge Becker) - definitely not a good sign for the creaking family’s harmony.

These are not deliberately cruel parents: they seem to love their children. But, when it comes to the latter’s sensibilities and sensitivities, they come up short. And, while the preoccupations of a marital break-up are very likely to tend toward dealing with the relations between the two adults concerned, the difficulties of discord make themselves felt throughout a family. Some might suggest that the modern nuclear family - devoid of much input from the older generation (grandparents) or from the adults’ siblings, for example - has much to answer for, as it is inherently unstable. Certainly in what we are permitted to witness in Thursday till Sunday, there is little to recommend this kernel of domesticity, especially as it relates to the junior members of the family.

One of the bittersweet delights in Sotomayor’s realisation, however, remains the attention she gives to her young protagonist, and the insights about stresses in childhood that she helps us achieve. This is no sociological tract - thankfully - nor does it demand anything. But the film does enhance the importance of cherishing the lives of children, whose perspective may not be completely formed, but whose humanity as persons require respect and compassionate understanding.

Thanks to the director’s humanism and sympathetic framing by cinematographer Bárbara Álvarez, the contrasts of the landscape and this family in adversity are given excellent counterpoint in texturing the film. Spirit, resilience and a sense of compassion ensure a grounded story is related in a telling way.