Chile was the ‘Guest Country’ at the 2018 Raindance Film Festival and Marialy Rivas’ new film ‘PRINCESITA’ was selected for the opening night.
Marialy Rivas now has two films under her belt. A contemporary of Sebastian Lélio and the Larraín brothers, her first film, ‘Young and Wild’ (2012) exploded onto the scene by winning the prize at the Sundance Film Festival screenwriting award, Best Feature film at the BAFICI Festival in Buenos Aires and received a clutch of nominations., as Rivas explains: -
“It was a wild experience… before Facebook and Twitter, Chile was the first country to have a social network called ‘Fotolook’ where you could post one pic a day with a caption. This was before social networks as we know them today and I started following this account called ‘Young & Wild’ that someone, either a girl or a woman was posting, full of sexual and religious stories. She wrote with a lot of slang, so I thought: Okay she’s young. But also, I could also see she knew how to write, so I kept thinking, is this an older woman who is playing this character? Is this a real person? Because on the account you only use pseudonyms. So I contacted her. I was living in Spain at the time, and I said, you know what? I am really interested in how you write… would you be interested in doing a movie? I want to do something with you, I don’t know if it would be a documentary or a fiction, but let’s get together and meet… she was living with her parents and because her parents didn’t know that she was bi-sexual, I didn’t want to expose her. Her writing was so funny and audacious that a lot of people loved her.”
Marialy Rivas
Young and Wild was very successful and proved that Rivas has a gift for fictionalizing real-life stories and bringing them successfully onto the screen. With her second feature, ‘Princesita’, she arrived at the screenplay in a similar fashion: -
“The idea [for ‘Princesita’] came to me when I read a news article in 2012. Many people thought the world was going to end [on December 21st 2012, by some cataclysmic event]. Do you remember? There was a family cult in Chile, composed only of men, and they had a girl who was a niece or granddaughter and they believed she was the chosen one who would carry the messiah and stop the end of the world happening. I read this story and wondered how these men never even stopped to think about what she might want? She was only a vehicle for their objectives. I thought: This is what Patriarchy looks like… and that was the starting point.”
In Rivas’ film PRINCESITA, the commune is also composed entirely of men except for the one young 12-year old girl Tamara ( the lovely and intriguing Sara Caballero). She innocently revels in her high status on being told she is the “chosen one”, the ‘Princess’. She is on the cusp of adolescence and does not question why she is the only one in the group allowed to go to a local school. Despite being warned that she is not to mingle with other students or talk about her life in the commune, she meets and falls in love with a classmate. Her unusual questions in class awaken the concern of her kindly school teacher (María Gracias Omegna) whose subsequent insistence on meeting her ‘parents’ helps to disturb the idyllic world by posing questions about the manner that the rigid and non-conformist leader Miguel,(Marcelo Alonso), runs the group.
When Tamara reaches puberty she gradually begins to understand the real purpose of her special status within the group. Her position that, at first, is the source of joy for her, as she feels blessed and safe in the arms of the leader, whose ‘wife’ she is to become, gradually descends into the tensions of a black world of horror. The reality of her situation comes far sooner than she had anticipated.
Sara Caballero and Marcelo Alonso
The film is beautifully shot by Sergio Armstrong, the Director of Photography, who, using specialized photographic lenses played with focus and length of field, combined with some very big close-ups. The visual contrasts form an integral part of the story and add to the subtle emotive development of the storyline: -
“I began to understand how malleable you can be, like painting, you have many colours, and the more you paint the more you understand how to mix them. So, when I started this movie, I had two main references, one is Sally Mann and oddly enough I used to have her pictures as a teenager pasted on my walls and then these images came back to me because all her work are her shots of her own children in idyllic places and they are all naked. Of course, there were no weird intentions or views, but the images still have something disturbing, there is something strange about this beauty. Then you have Bill Henson … and his photographs are like chiaroscuro paintings, everything is dark except for one point of light. These two photographers are opposite… but to me they related so I felt they reflected the arc of the movie.”
Rivas deliberately requested the colourist to add the effect of gold, like in the quattrocento, and she asked the cameraman (Armstrong) to develop a nightmarish look for Miguel, so that he would move in and out of focus and looks monstrous. These visual images have a myth–like quality that take us back into a ‘Fairy- Tale world, before it was ‘sanitized’ by later re-tellers of the tales. In the original story of 'The Sleeping Beauty', for instance, the princess falls into an enchanted sleep when a piece of flax gets caught under her finger. While she sleeps, she is raped and impregnated by the prince and she only awakens again when she has given birth to twins, and one of them sucks her finger, pulling out the flax that caused her sleep. It is a story of abuse, and patriarchal control.
Marialy Rivas was attracted to examine the idea of patriarchy and how people behave under palpable but invisible tensions. The story of the commune also had some echoes in her own life experiences, from growing up in life under a dictatorship, where many issues were present but also subconscious: -
“As a child I grew up in a dictatorship. You could feel the darkness and danger but you couldn’t really understand it, you were not a grown up... like Tamara experienced it. It was not the same form of abuse but it was still abuse... it was terrifying and bad, but you couldn’t place it, and so I guess this has always haunted me.”
It was only when Rivas began her research for the film that she became fully aware that the story about the commune was also a story of abuse: -
“At the beginning I was looking at the main issue but the more I entered into the story, the more I realized that I was talking about child abuse. So, I started interviewing abused women and talking to child psychologists and psychiatrists, including people from the Colonia de la Dignidad, the biggest cult in Chile. It still exists although the leaders are in jail. What struck me was that when they described the abuse, they couldn't remember it and I couldn’t understand how such a physical experience [could be forgotten.] They remembered certain things, some feelings, or maybe a painting they were looking at. They had had to detach themselves from their reality in order not to allow themselves to understand what was going on… So, they felt trapped. That is why I have Tamara talking through a voice-over, giving her that detached limbo effect of: “I’m not really here, I’m somewhere else.”
Princesita
The music of the film is also very evocative. Rivas found it was hard to find. Apart from the screenwriting award from Sundance for ‘Young and Wild’, she also won a Skywalker Sound Lab bursary for Princesita: -
“The music was interesting, because I went to that lab and I realized that I always think about the music after the images are shot, I don’t know why. I have studied music since I was nine but for some reason I need the image. So, at the lab… I worked with a very young & talented female composer, she worked on 2 scenes … then, being in co-production, we hired an Argentine team of very well-known musicians but when they returned the scenes, they didn’t work …there was too much music … it was beautiful, with violins and everything, but it was too much and I didn’t know how to explain that I didn’t want a score that sounded like that. Then I got together with a friend of mine, he’s a very young musician… he has a band that was named best band of 2016 or 2017 by Jim Jarmusch. He is very experimental and I explained that I kept looking for the music and I did not really know how to express what I wanted… so, we discussed tonal palettes and colours and he said: You know what you want? You want simple notes, one note that I can pitch which will give you a sense of being uncomfortable but you don’t know why. He played two examples of pitch and I said: Oh my God, that’s the music! He then played over the film for 3 days and that was it. It reaches you in a subconscious way.”
Casting the production was particularly hard in Chile as there are no professional child actors: -
“There are kids whose parent maybe work in something like movies or theatre… or go to theatre workshops. We tried many girls, even some 18-year olds, but then you have to make the whole kid-cast older, and they no longer look like 12-years olds. It is such a precise moment in time for a girl when she becomes a woman, also for the boys, because they are smaller, their legs are long and weird. It is that time, around puberty, full of that awkwardness. It cannot be faked or acted. We finally found her (Sara Caballero) she understood and was being super brave in giving her voice to this story... we tried to give her tools that separated her real self from the character…because, hey, these are kids… so, they could get confused. You need to give them tools and a character to inhabit: This is you, who has these friends and this life with your parents, and this is Tamara, so she can separate them both.”
So, what starts out as a slightly unusual coming-of-age film set in idyllic landscapes and surroundings, gradually reveals its dark underbelly, taking the child into a nightmare that leads her to an ending of almost biblical significance: -
“To burn it all down to be able to be free.”
The film has been released in a number of countries and should be released in the UK next year. Updates will be posted.
Princesita:
DIR: Marialy Rivas
Screenplay Camila Gutiérrez, Manuela Infante and Marialy Rivas
Production Juan de Dios Larraín, Rocío Jadue , Mariane Hartard
Music Ignacio Pérez Marín
DOP Sergio Armstrong
Cast Sara Caballero, Marcelo Alonso, María Gracia Omegna, Nathalie Acevedo
