Review by Eric Hillis
Directed by: Nayra Ilic García
Starring: Helen Mrugalski, Daniela Ramírez, Néstor Cantillana, Mariana Loyola, Nicolás Contreras, Clemente Rodríguez, Erto Pantoja
There was a recent brouhaha among film circles on social media when some poster criticised Richard Linklater's Boyhood for failing to address the political issues of its 2000s setting. The truth is, though, that the average kid couldn't care less about politics, and current affairs are generally considered that boring stuff that adults talk about. Take Celeste (Helen Mrugalski), the 15-year-old heroine of writer/director Nayra Ilic García's coming of age drama Cuerpo Celeste. It's 1990 and Chile is undergoing massive change as the Pinochet dictatorship finally comes to an end, but this is all irrelevant to Celeste, who is more focussed on which of her two male admirers she might hook up with as she spends her days playing paddleball and swimming on a sun-kissed beach.
Celeste's innocent world is shattered however when her father dies from a sudden heart attack. Her distraught mother, Consuelo (Daniela Ramirez), leaves Celeste in the care of an aunt for several months before calling her daughter to join her in the family home in a coastal town in the Atacama Desert. Feeling her mother abandoned her, Celeste isn't too happy with the reunion, but then she reacquaints herself with Jano (Nicolas Contreras), a local working class boy with whom she has long shared a romantic friction.
Cuerpo Celeste is distinctive in how its more dramatic elements are playing out on the periphery of the story. Mass graves filled with the "disappeared" of Pinochet's reign of terror are in the process of being exhumed in the town and Jano and his father have fallen in with drug dealers. Both of these subplots are kept at a distance as we see this world through Celeste's naive and sheltered eyes. Celeste begins to accumulate clues that suggest the world isn't the chilled out place she believed it to be, that while her middle class privilege allowed her to frolic in the sun most of the adults in her country were quietly going through hell, but none of the grown-ups in her life are willing to indulge her line of questioning as they seek to protect her.
In many ways García's film is a Chilean companion to Walter Salles' Oscar-nominated Brazilian drama I'm Still Here, which similarly focussed on a family striving for normality amid a dictatorship in the sudden absence of their patriarch. But in focussing on its teenage protagonist we're denied the bigger picture here, and the film's political aspects will only impact viewers familiar with Chilean history. Thankfully it functions as an engaging coming of age story regardless of its backdrop, with young Mrugalski excellent in the title role. Celeste's mix of innocence and inquisitiveness takes us back to that most difficult time of life, the mid-teens, when you're no longer a child but the adult world insists on treating you like one. Like the recent British drama Last Swim, Cuerpo Celeste climaxes in a celestial event that functions like the monolith in 2001, an evolutionary signifier that makes its young heroine realise her place in the world, helping her to make peace with such a realisation in the process.
