Directed by: Dominga Sotomayor
Distributed by: TBA
Written by Eric Zhu
65/100
A brittle character study cum landscape film disguised as a drama about a woman and her dog, Dominga Sotomayor’s “La Perra” is both perfectly judged and ravishingly beautiful. Set on a remote island in the South of Chile, the film is situated within a community of seaweed harvesters, one of whom, Silvia, has her regimented lifestyle disrupted when she rescues an abandoned puppy that washes up on the coastline. The approach and milieu evoke everything from Epstein’s “Finis Terrae” to Rossellini, the emotions stirred by the woman’s mercurial relationship with the animal articulated through the turbulent landscape of rocky, windswept cliffs and crashing waves.
By eschewing character psychology, Sotomayor’s film sidesteps nearly all of the pitfalls of its potentially saccharine premise. Her matter-of-fact approach to narrative gives e.g. Silvia’s brief separation from her husband with the same weight as any given scene of seaweed harvesting. Despite their complex bond, there are few scenes of Silvia talking to the dog, and even fewer that manipulatively anthropomorphize Yuri. Even in the rare instances where Sotomayor takes Yuri’s point of view, such as an indelible digression where she runs into a group of wild horses, the dog is treated as alien and unknowable.
“La Perra” hinges on Yuri’s disappearance. An initial search mission takes Silvia into a cave. There, her sobs dissolve into an image of a tremulous stream dripping onto the cliffside. The flashback precipitated by Yuri’s disappearance is only obliquely related to the narrative, depicting not Silvia’s evident, but unspoken struggles to have a child of her own, but instead a childhood trauma that expands our understanding of the island, its relation to the outside world, and Silvia’s tenuous place in the community. When Yuri returns with pups of her own, Silvia’s unrequited love rapidly curdles, her smoldering emotions intensified by Oyarzún’s recessive performance. Despite its stony surface, “La Perra” is seductively open-ended, a sensory bath of rural life and natural phenomena that progressively accumulates emotional force until the ocean itself catches fire.
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