Avis des critiques

Rather than show, hint, or even prefigure, Martinessi, proving himself skilled at such an approach, instead drops us into his protagonist’s story without any discernible exposition, the first-time feature director citing films like GREY GARDENS, WHATEVER HAPPENED TO BABY JANE, and THE BITTER TEARS OF PETRA VON KANT as inspiration.

By the end of the film, the audience feels like it knows his heroine at almost precisely the same time she has gotten to know herself. It's a minor kind of magic.

Over the course of the film, those routines are shattered and suddenly time starts rushing forward again, bringing with it the unexpected, the painful, the joyful. Emotions never before experienced come surging to the surface. How Martinessi pulls this off—in what is his first feature—is nothing less than extraordinary.

Before you quite have your bearings in the story — just as you are trying to absorb the basic facts about the characters — “The Heiresses” almost subliminally alerts you to complexities of sexuality and status that many films would prefer to simplify.

The story is minimalist, its thematic substance seeming to emerge alchemically, materializing out of the interstitial gaps that separate speech and action, through an accrual of hushed small talk and unhurried silences.

That’s what makes The Heiresses . . . so refreshing, and its central character so mesmerizing, as well as infuriating. This debut feature by writer-director Marcelo Martinessi centers on two women—one with formidable wherewithal to face life’s challenges, the other with a tendency to mooch around passively and let fate get the better of her. The film’s novelty is that it goes with the seemingly insipid partner.

Through stillness, the smallest arch of an eyebrow and shift of an eye, Brun brilliantly conveys the disorientation of a woman who has always relied on others to service her needs and whims.

It struck me at the time as an almost parodically typical Berlinale selection, which is a lot for a film to overcome. In hindsight, The Heiresses, a portrait of Chela (Ana Bryn), a woman of a certain age with her own private collection of phobias, has grown on me. . . . I understand that many critics have their problems with some of the jury’s choices, but Bryn absolutely deserves her Silver Bear for Best Actress.

We’ve seen before in cinema the constricted, oneiric world of the cloistered rich in their slow decline (it seems to be taking forever!), but the almost entirely female-only world of Marcelo Martinessi’s debut feature, as well as its focus on rich women segueing (if they aren’t already firmly entrenched) into their elderly years, offers a modest but beguiling keyhole view into a specific and rarely filmed milieu.