Ghosts and the Living: Jorge Thielen Armand's La Soledad
La Soledad, Jorge Thielen Armand (2016)
La Soledad opens with footage from a homemade super-8 movie. The filmmaker's soft voice-over recounts how he and his relatives spent weekends and holidays in the summer house of his childhood, while cheery people smile toward the camera. The young man points out his great-grandfather Lelelo and speaks of his encounters with him, even if the old man was already dead when the filmmaker was born. In the video, we see Rosina and her husband, the filmmaker's great-grandparents' caretakers, who cleaned the property and also lived there with their grandson, El Negro (José Dolores López).
La Soledad, Jorge Thielen Armand (2016)
This footage shows a typical upper-middle class Latin American family enjoying a day outdoors, with domestic workers serving food and attending to the children as their offspring play. La Soledad, however, is not an obvious tale of the deep-rooted racial and class differences that permeate that hemisphere's social fabric. It presents a much more nuanced, tense, and complicated narrative immersed in an equally complex aesthetics.
La Soledad (solitude, loneliness in Spanish) names the run-down house in Caracas, Venezuela where the main story takes place—a place owned by some, namely the filmmaker's family, but inhabited by others, like Rosina: both dead and alive. It is a landscape of conflict, despair, and uncertainty wherein the insurmountable barrier between these ones who own property and the others who work for them can be crossed at moments of empathy and solidarity. But the hurdle is, and always will be, to impose the naked truth of the privilege these elites take for granted.
The house La Soledad is, at the same time, a space of exploration and possibility. El Negro is mysteriously drawn to a concealed room, where an unnamed ghost—possibly his own grandfather, or a former slave—passes him a silent message. He then removes a beautiful sculpture from the house and trades it for a metal detector. El Negro becomes obsessed with finding a buried treasure—las morocotas, or gold coins hidden by the slaves working for the filmmaker's ancestors. Rosina explains that the treasure is cursed, rooted in the pain and suffering experienced by slaves inside the house. El Negro finds razor blades inside a wall and finally gives up his expectant search.
These scenes underscore the director's position vis-à-vis Venezuela, his country of birth if not of residence (he actually lives in Canada). Staging the clashes between his own class and the poor and unprivileged who have historically served them, Thielen Armand's opera prima evokes the complicated economic and political situation of a nation torn by duress, conflict, and class battle. A scarcity of dialogue and multi-layered characters avoid the crass didacticism that characterize many recent Latin American films addressing such concerns. The film's mise-en-scène and documentary-style elements—footage of the families, the use of protagonists' real names, real blood ties and the employment relationships between both families—are actually part of a scripted story. Rosina was played by her older daughter, scenes were rehearsed, and the non-professional actors who play themselves were carefully coached by a professional, the very skillful Tatiana Mabo.
The astonishingly crafted photography glimpses at the hard life of those who have little outside of La Soledad. El Negro strolls the city looking for Rosina's blood pressure medication to no avail, while Marley, El Negro's wife and a strong presence in both the house and the film, cleans a wonderful modern home, the opposite of the one in which she lives. Once splendorous in a bygone era, La Soledad is now dilapidated and inhabited by the ghosts of the past.
La Soledad, Jorge Thielen Armand (2016)
And yet, Rosina's family wants to stay in La Soledad, even if Thielen Armand's family had decided to sell it. Both El Negro and Rosina defiantly sense it is their prerogative to stay in a house that does not legally belong to them. This belief opens onto alternative forms of class relations circulating around the notion of possession. None of La Soledad's characters play the paternalistic game classically imposed by Latin American elites, who tend to feel invaded by the poor and expect gratitude from their domestics, even if the domestics receive what is theirs, be these fair wages or compensation after a lifetime of service. References to slavery—the region's founding institution of wealth still enjoyed by many members of the elite—may contribute to the firmness of El Negro and his family's claims to a space legally owned by others.
La Soledad, Jorge Thielen Armand (2016)
One of 12 selected projects in the Biennale College Cinema, La Soledad was shown at the 73rd Venice International Film Festival and many other festivals around the world, including the Festival of Venezuelan Cinema, where it won Best First Film and Best Sound. Yet this was the sole venue in the country where the film was screened for the public; La Soledad has not been released commercially in Venezuela. Despite the dire precariousness of its current situation, Venezuela's past fifteen years have enjoyed a flourishing cultural sphere, characterized by the emergence of new initiatives in the world of literature and the visual and audiovisual arts.
It is a massive loss for Venezuelan moviegoers that La Soledad is absent from cinemas in the country it intends to portray. Indeed, Venezuela's political situation today, in 2019, has deteriorated enormously in relation to the time the film was produced. And yet everything seems possible in the film's final scene when El Negro, in the open space of a beach he and his family visit, drifts in the infinite blue sea, free of the multiple constraints they are subjected to, in a fleeting moment that still feels everlasting.
La Soledad, Jorge Thielen Armand (2016)