Stories of young adulthood’s unique growing pains are familiar fodder for feature films, and writer, director, and film editor Axel Cheb Terrab’s first feature Gala & Kiwi is a startling, rough-around-the-edges look at a friendship gone awry in these turbulent years. This time of life immediately after leaving one’s family home and higher education but before establishing one’s self and identity as a separate, mature being – often through artistic achievement, professional success, a home of one’s own, and/or establishing a family and steady friend circle of one’s own – draw their appeal in narrative fiction from their tumultuous nature and almost universal recognisability. It is hard to find a person who did not experience some degree of upheaval during these years.
In the case of two women in their mid-twenties – referred to by each other with only their fruit-based nicknames, Gala (Carmen Fillol) and Kiwi (Agustina Cabo) for most of the film’s run time – a reunion night turns into a series of reckonings. Terrab’s script frames the vast majority of this film as a two-hander that starts when Gala and Kiwi stumble into Kiwi’s flat, giggling and tipsy, and only lets other people into their shared world in the film’s final minutes. But even from this auspicious “girl’s night” start, something is amiss. The two profess a loving anxiety to catch up, that they let the time get away from them, that six years passed in the blink of an eye and they should be able to pick up where they left off when they graduated, that their previously inseparability can be reinstated. But under the surface, resentments glisten. It is only a matter of time before the women must confront events they both remember differently – or choose to walk away from each other entirely.
Gala & Kiwi had its world premiere at the 2024 Edinburgh International Film Festival as the inaugural “Lydia Miles Celebrates” special screening showcase. The film festival’s website states that the film was selected for being “a visionary new work of cinema in the pioneering spirit of writer, academic, and former EIFF director Lynda Myles,” who introduced the film at its public screenings. Gala & Kiwi was shot over eight days during the pandemic – no small feat, and a testament to the commitment of its small cast and crew. With two powerhouse central performances, dizzying pacing, dramatic framing of otherwise mundane conversations confined to Kiwi’s four apartment walls, and the ensuing claustrophobic yet electric atmosphere, the film furthermore feels apt for this category.
Unreliable memory and unreliable narration play a large role in Gala & Kiwi. One of the film’s most striking scenes sees Gala and Kiwi rehashing the past while literally talking past each other, both looking at the other’s reflection in angled mirrors. Terrab and cinematographer Joaquín Pulpeiro, working on such a limited scale in terms of space and time, find numerous visual shortcuts to delineate the emotional distance between the two protagonists and getting under the surface far before they admit their true feelings to each other.
Ultimately, however, the tension cannot be sustained over the film’s 109 minutes, making Gala & Kiwi a hollow triumph of style over substance. While the conventional five-act structure is not suitable to all tales, the number of confrontations that would prove the climax to simpler films proves numbing. Instead of reaching some sort of catharsis – for Gala, for Kiwi, or even for the audience – another digression emerges to throw a new wrench in the works.
Cabo’s performance as Kiwi reveals a sweetness up front that gives way to someone quietly spiky and wounded – a sensitive artistic soul with major trauma and an attraction to history’s great victims (possibly as a result). She has just written a play about Joan of Arc that is set to have its premiere at a significant theatre; when Gala performs a monologue from it, a real vulnerability sits under the guarded words and the friend’s half-sincere performance.
As Gala, Fillol creates a cypher whose behavior is consistently captivating even as it threatens believability. Is Gala a warm and loving friend blinded by her own former popularity? Is she a textbook narcissist that therapists (or the perennially online) warn of, so wrapped up in her own world that each soul-baring, earth-shattering reveal that her memory or self-delusion is faulty barely causes her to blink? Is she the most confident woman on earth, or the most heartless? Is she even real, or merely a figment of Kiwi’s imagination? There are no answers in this multi-layered, complicated performance and the script’s twists and turns, though it begins to become less fascinating and more irritating as the film progresses. In the end, Gala & Kiwi seems more interested in dialing up the conflict to the maximum rather than seeking resolution for its characters or viewers.
Gala & Kiwi is a puzzling, bold picture that ultimately denies a neat conclusion or easy answers, but also eschews any real satisfaction in the journey. It is worth seeking out for Fillol’s and Cabo’s (hopefully) star-making turns and the confident visual style of Terrab, but falls short of its potential with one too many false start and false ending.
Gala & Kiwi recently screened at the Edinburgh International Film Festival.
Learn more about the film at the EIFF site for the title.
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