I wrote this review, an extended version of which was published on POV, a danish film zine. The full text can also be found on my blog.
"Alumbramiento" is a powerful cinematic experience, simple yet unpredictable. The surprise ending resolves not only the specific short narrative, but sheds light - as the title suggests - into the realm of big unanswered questions.
It all starts in a dark bedroom so impenetrable one is unsure when exactly "Lightborne" (as the title is translated in English) begins and the title sequence ends. Did a phone ring? Sounds mingle, invisible hands awake and fumble for a switch. In the middle of the night. A man and a woman.
Now we're in a car, slicing through a yawning sequence of on/off lamp-posts, flashing like low-energy question marks, without apparent purpose nor answers, so much more powerful is the night. It's a journey with no peace of mind. The man drives, focused, spent. His eyes gripping the road through the steering wheel, his mind taking logical stabs at the scarcity of solutions, given the dire medical report he just heard. His woman sits by him, navigating by feelings rather than professional instinct. She offers a hand but he refuses, they don't hold together. Pain and fear create a kinds of distance that - uncured - can be fatal. The director frames each separately, two broken halves deep in silent visuals of the hallucinatory real. The dawn is much further away. How can life be fixed?
We understand from scant dialogue delivered with surgical precision - in script and performance - that this scenario is recurrent. 120 seconds into the film and we are immersed in an amniotic texture of lucid confusion, a quiet helpless re- investigation of the apparent dead-ends of life, relationships, memory. Before we can even begin to try and escape to safe and controlled rationalizations (what city are we in? have I seen a film by Chapero before?) or connect plot strands (where are they going? who is sick?), a darkened apartment and bedroom engulfs and suppresses our resistance. We are witnesses in a magnetized, polarized cinematic space of dark and bare practical lighting of the devastating narrative undercurrent: life is much more subtle, weaker, than death. We are here to spend ten minutes in the bedroom next door and - through a magical unpredictable development in narrative - we will stay there much longer.
The characters enter, the forces of life assemble around each other's weakening pulses, matching optimism against pessimism. "She will make it. She always makes it" says his sister. Silence replies. Rafa shifts shape from son-who-is a- doctor to Doctor-who-is-also-son by directing a nurse in the technical requirements of tonight's pain-aversion attempts. This is the doctor's mother and she will soon die despite the morphine and more morphine.
Predictably, death will not be mentioned around a deathbed. This is a story about death and the living. Its ending escapes classical categories of dramatic endings (happy, sad, good, bad, etc). In "Alumbramiento" the passing on of the old mother is not the end of the story. It is not the tipping point where we cry.
Here is an even closer look at this special film from a filmmaking angle.
Story
"Alumbramiento" has a simple plot yet a complex structure. There are several relationships defined by the story, not provided before the story. Information, when needed, is integral to the development, as in real life. We see what we need to see - and what we manage to understand - at the exact moment the story requires it, all "in medias res", includes all the characters' lives, which we encounter "in the middle of the night". Focus on the now, nothing more. During the nighttime ellipsis at the mother's house, we see a montage: images of a butterfly, a photograph of a woman holding hands with a boy. None of this images added narrative burdens by imposing overly-complicated symbols to decode. The family imagery remained elusive, poetic, organic to the moment. It is sound that brings the past to life, the clear sound of a shared song sung in tears, wash away the heavy cough of departure and welcoming the final silence.
Endings
"a surprise ending" can be any clever solution pushing standard plot structures aside. "Alumbramiento" has a miniature three-act setup (the call, the wait, the end) and cannot prevent the old woman's death. To the contrary, it is a film about facilitating the end of suffering through a shared memory of accomplishment and effort. The dead woman's smiling face is an image of eternal happiness and purpose. Rarely have I ever seen on film a sequence so poignant: a woman choosing, accepting to die, publicly honoring the good in the mystery of life.
Two of everything
the director extends the cinematic aesthetic contradiction of light and darkness to all areas of content. The film's apparently static locations and forms function as a delicate visual and aural layer, with particular magic in the use of duality, ambiguity and repetition. The son has been there many times before, the sister suggests the old mother "always pulls thru", morphine injections are repeated, childhood memories recur, aesthetic patterns exist.
Repetition is a key to modulation. it establishes what small later variations can highlight. Modal musical scales are a parallel example.
The final gestures (holding hands over the dead body) is a repeated gesture as, earlier, hands would not hold each other.
Eduardo Chapero-Jackson is in full control of "Alumbramiento", its motionless cinematic textures, and its emotional high. "Alumbramiento" can mean in Spanish both "illumination" and " delivery", the awaited climax, the arrival of light and peace. Imagine all that, in a film devoid of any visible sunlight.
"Alumbramiento" is a powerful cinematic experience, simple yet unpredictable. The surprise ending resolves not only the specific short narrative, but sheds light - as the title suggests - into the realm of big unanswered questions.
It all starts in a dark bedroom so impenetrable one is unsure when exactly "Lightborne" (as the title is translated in English) begins and the title sequence ends. Did a phone ring? Sounds mingle, invisible hands awake and fumble for a switch. In the middle of the night. A man and a woman.
Now we're in a car, slicing through a yawning sequence of on/off lamp-posts, flashing like low-energy question marks, without apparent purpose nor answers, so much more powerful is the night. It's a journey with no peace of mind. The man drives, focused, spent. His eyes gripping the road through the steering wheel, his mind taking logical stabs at the scarcity of solutions, given the dire medical report he just heard. His woman sits by him, navigating by feelings rather than professional instinct. She offers a hand but he refuses, they don't hold together. Pain and fear create a kinds of distance that - uncured - can be fatal. The director frames each separately, two broken halves deep in silent visuals of the hallucinatory real. The dawn is much further away. How can life be fixed?
We understand from scant dialogue delivered with surgical precision - in script and performance - that this scenario is recurrent. 120 seconds into the film and we are immersed in an amniotic texture of lucid confusion, a quiet helpless re- investigation of the apparent dead-ends of life, relationships, memory. Before we can even begin to try and escape to safe and controlled rationalizations (what city are we in? have I seen a film by Chapero before?) or connect plot strands (where are they going? who is sick?), a darkened apartment and bedroom engulfs and suppresses our resistance. We are witnesses in a magnetized, polarized cinematic space of dark and bare practical lighting of the devastating narrative undercurrent: life is much more subtle, weaker, than death. We are here to spend ten minutes in the bedroom next door and - through a magical unpredictable development in narrative - we will stay there much longer.
The characters enter, the forces of life assemble around each other's weakening pulses, matching optimism against pessimism. "She will make it. She always makes it" says his sister. Silence replies. Rafa shifts shape from son-who-is a- doctor to Doctor-who-is-also-son by directing a nurse in the technical requirements of tonight's pain-aversion attempts. This is the doctor's mother and she will soon die despite the morphine and more morphine.
Predictably, death will not be mentioned around a deathbed. This is a story about death and the living. Its ending escapes classical categories of dramatic endings (happy, sad, good, bad, etc). In "Alumbramiento" the passing on of the old mother is not the end of the story. It is not the tipping point where we cry.
Here is an even closer look at this special film from a filmmaking angle.
Story
"Alumbramiento" has a simple plot yet a complex structure. There are several relationships defined by the story, not provided before the story. Information, when needed, is integral to the development, as in real life. We see what we need to see - and what we manage to understand - at the exact moment the story requires it, all "in medias res", includes all the characters' lives, which we encounter "in the middle of the night". Focus on the now, nothing more. During the nighttime ellipsis at the mother's house, we see a montage: images of a butterfly, a photograph of a woman holding hands with a boy. None of this images added narrative burdens by imposing overly-complicated symbols to decode. The family imagery remained elusive, poetic, organic to the moment. It is sound that brings the past to life, the clear sound of a shared song sung in tears, wash away the heavy cough of departure and welcoming the final silence.
Endings
"a surprise ending" can be any clever solution pushing standard plot structures aside. "Alumbramiento" has a miniature three-act setup (the call, the wait, the end) and cannot prevent the old woman's death. To the contrary, it is a film about facilitating the end of suffering through a shared memory of accomplishment and effort. The dead woman's smiling face is an image of eternal happiness and purpose. Rarely have I ever seen on film a sequence so poignant: a woman choosing, accepting to die, publicly honoring the good in the mystery of life.
Two of everything
the director extends the cinematic aesthetic contradiction of light and darkness to all areas of content. The film's apparently static locations and forms function as a delicate visual and aural layer, with particular magic in the use of duality, ambiguity and repetition. The son has been there many times before, the sister suggests the old mother "always pulls thru", morphine injections are repeated, childhood memories recur, aesthetic patterns exist.
Repetition is a key to modulation. it establishes what small later variations can highlight. Modal musical scales are a parallel example.
The final gestures (holding hands over the dead body) is a repeated gesture as, earlier, hands would not hold each other.
Eduardo Chapero-Jackson is in full control of "Alumbramiento", its motionless cinematic textures, and its emotional high. "Alumbramiento" can mean in Spanish both "illumination" and " delivery", the awaited climax, the arrival of light and peace. Imagine all that, in a film devoid of any visible sunlight.
