In Cuerpo Celeste, the symbolically loaded debut feature from Chilean writer-director Nayra Ilic García, the past not only fractures the present and future but actively exists along with it as if they are all one and the same. The film explores that threshold, the possibility to re-encounter even something we have yet to experience, in search of some kind of transcendence for its protagonist and, by extension, its director.
But the story’s provenance is hardly abstract. If anything, it is autobiographical, culled from García’s experience of having a loved one die in her arms nearly a decade ago. Past that, the story is set on an astonishingly remote beach by the Atacama Desert, where the director came of age and where her family tried to forge a life separate from the hostility of Augusto Pinochet’s despotic regime, until that sheltered world began to collapse. If the film’s central allegory is reminiscent of Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest, that’s because it is. The Atacama Desert, known for its extensive deposits of nitrates and lack of humidity, used to be a perfect mass grave for Pinochet’s victims. And due to the nature of the area, most of the buried bodies were nearly mummified. García projects that painful fabric of sociopolitical reality onto her fifteen-year-old heroine, Celeste, played by newcomer Helen Mrugalski, whose sun-drenched life is upended by a crushing incident. The teenager is forced to reckon with that fraught personal transition, just as her country moves past the imposing specter of a cruel dictatorship.
Though the film doesn’t display any formal transgressions as far as coming-of-age cinema is concerned, García mounts Cuerpo Celeste with poetic tenderness and curious mysticism, and the camera luxuriates in long takes and wide spaces, functioning like waves charging at the viewer—tidal and pulsating. At the same time, there’s nearly a Tarkovskian appeal to the manner in which the film harnesses the image of water as emblematic of change, as well as the recurring image of a flock of birds nosediving into the water. David Tarantino’s hypnotic and pensive score reinforces this cinematic atmosphere right from the opening sequence, which finds the protagonist dashing barefoot toward the open sea.
It’s the holidays, and the new year is fast approaching. It’s a watershed moment in Chilean history as the dictatorship nears its end, but for Celeste, it’s simply another possibility to run off to another city for a fireworks display, or spend more days soaking in the sun, along with her friends, Jano (Nicolás Contreras) and Simón (Clemente Rodríguez), who both fancy her. Yet her parents, Consuelo (Daniela Ramírez) and Alonso (Néstor Cantillana), are watchful of her. They’re far from overbearing, especially Celeste’s father who has a soft spot for her, but there’s palpable frustration in her every time the two easily snuff out her honest curiosities about adult stuff, her questions often met with a neat “nothing,” even as she frequently spots them conversing at a distance. And contrary to her expectations, what lies ahead of Celeste is anything but warm and pacific.
Shot chiefly at daylight by cinematographer Sergio Armstrong, Cuerpo Celeste evokes a muted glow that obscures the film’s political undercurrent, at least initially. The sounds that reverberate through the vastness of the desert, the crashing waves, and the solar eclipse that draws Celeste back to the coastal town months after living with her aunt, Ema (Mariana Loyola), to recuperate from the devastating demise of her father the morning of the new year, obviously allude to Chile’s dark history and the grief that lingers. Mrugalski’s portrayal here is at once endearing and elegiac, reflecting a poignant realization that the idyllic, sun-soaked life she once knew is now eroded by the sweeping grief before her. It’s a life caught between return and departure: her mother is in a downward spiral, her affection for Jano has gone into free fall, their family home is now up for sale, and the memory of her father rests only in a film of photos she desperately clings to.
The restraint that the film lends to its narrative almost instantly brings to mind Pedro Almodóvar’s Parallel Mothers in that while it confronts the legacy of the political violence of the Pinochet regime, just as Almodóvar finally traces the footprints of the Spanish civil war and Franco’s fascist terror via his vibrant cinematic palette, it works only to a certain extent. The film creates a palimpsest by layering its heroine’s personal affliction and the ethos of 1990s Chile on top of each other, showing us how state-sanctioned horrors could slowly seep into our domestic lives. And yet here, that broader political horror does not fully inhabit the domiciliary anguish between Celeste and her mother, and how the former finds an ideal maternal figure in her aunt, even as the film constantly builds to it. Similarly, apart from the penultimate documentary footage and explicit articulation about the role of Celeste’s parents in exhuming the mummified bodies of the disappeared, the narrative does not really let us into that critical edge. (What if Alonso got killed in the process of retrieving the bodies, instead of dying of a sudden heart attack? Of course, this is only wishful thinking.) Still, Cuerpo Celeste leans into its rawness and emotional tenacity, even as its textual machinations tend to feel flat at times. It is a striking elegy as much as it is a hopeful snapshot of a country on the brink of political reconstruction.
Cuerpo Celeste recently premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival.
Learn more about the film at the Tribeca site for the title.
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