A woman leaves her reclusive existence in the mountains of Patagonia to search for her missing father.
Review by Benjamin Poole
Directed by: Sofia Petersen
Starring: Tina Sconochini, Dario Haro, Carolina Tejeda
Argentine auteur Sofía Petersen's Olivia opens with captivating folklore intensity. In the deep indigos and tangerines of the 16mm Ektachrome frame (mmm), we witness a father and daughter eke out a rustic existence in rural Patagonia. It could very well be at the end of the world though, this wide-open space of precisely filmed moss-covered rocks, undulating fields, crumbling soil which is so, so far from civilisation. The landscape is expansive, but Olivia (Tina Sconochini, the ethereal beauty of an alt Shelley Duvall) and dad are hermetically sealed within their small, A-frame home: cosy with poured tea and candles oozing correspondingly soft shadows. Inside, we discern a strangeness to the dynamic, as while Papa is reliably gruff, Olivia is unusually naïf like, more girl than the full-grown woman she is. Spectrum coded, Olivia sleeps all day, and exists at night, seeing her father only at dusk... A fairy tale configuration, then, yet one of the deep European darkness and peasantry of Grimms, rather than the velvet aspiration of Perrault. As the wind brews outside, and Olivia hunts for insects, Petersen's pensive filmmaking primes us to anticipate threat or disruption: each shot seems weighted with an almost occult significance, Olivia's wide-eyed negotiation of her circumscribed world inviting narrative expectation... (the feel of Olivia at this stage reminded me of the work of multi-disciplinarian artist Jenny Hval, with her similarly orphic eye).
A call to action does come when Papa fails to return home, which means that Olivia must descend from the mountains to the soon-to-be vividly drawn world of people below to relocate him. However, as Olivia leaves in search of her absconded father, Olivia becomes likewise untethered. What follows is an episodic if atmospheric picaresque where our heroine meets the various strange and nocturnal characters of Tierra del Fuego, via an ostensibly random narrative energy...
The eerie coze of the opening is brutally disrupted by the film's next sequence, which shows prolonged and completely gratuitous footage of the slaughterhouse where Papa works. Trigger warning: you see it all. The cows with their big and beautiful eyes herded in fear through the dark to be shot in the head by whatever it is these cunts use to kill innocent animals; the lucky ones, that is, as we see bovine suffering when the bolt doesn't work first time with a few doomed friesians. Is a metaphor at work, with the cluelessly questing Olivia analogous to these poor beasts as she weathers circumstances beyond her control? Or is this just exploitation on the film's part, with these prolonged sequences affording Olivia readymade sensation? I'm of the mind that no animal should die just because you fancy a snack, let alone to grant emotional provocation to a movie. After a few minutes of this, maybe you will be too. This is not the poetry of Georges Franju's Blood of the Beasts, which juxtaposes slaughterhouse imagery with suburban existence because experimental: Olivia simply shows this mass murder as is (nor is it the focussed polemic of 'Tender Is the Flesh' by Agustina Bazterrica, coincidentally also South American: WHAT a novel for a book club, take it from me).
I mean, these sequences just go on, to an extent that even those weirdos who like the Faces of Death films (orig not the new one with lovely Barbie Ferreira and mother xcx) would start to get edgy. The scene is testament to the sporadic nature of what follows. The first act's deep palette is superseded by daylight frames of a bleached bone brightness as the soft safety of Olivia's world drains away. Her encounters are erstwhile marked by an insistent strangeness, and you might find pleasure in the well-staged set pieces of sequences such as a busload of Papa's co-workers bursting into song, a suicidal swim in a midnight ocean, the draping work of an artist in the last moments.
It's the sort of approach which people call Lynchian, but I demur. In Lynch what hits so deep is that the alterity utterly convinces, that's what is so frightening and deeply affective about the work. Of course Dean Stockwell is going to sing 'In Dreams', and naturally the pale man is at Bill Pullman's house. The uncanny seems inevitable as we've been drawn into accepting a destabilised world against our better judgement. However, in Olivia things just sort of happen to our hero. There is a cathartic sequence wherein she does a Napoleon Dynamite and dances alone in a bar to 'Alma de Diamante' by Spinetta Jade, backgrounded by the nonchalance of middle-aged male drinkers. Like the cow killing, it goes on a bit. In another moment of lurid sensationalism, we see Olivia strip nude to filially snuggle with the aforementioned artist, the camera capturing the exposed curves of Sconochini's body to imbue the scene with an unearned rawness and immediacy. I mean it looks great. Arty, different, weird. But like the emperor, she has no clothes.
Olivia is in UK cinemas from April 24th.
