Recencies van critici

Writer-director María Paz González’s first feature takes a well-worn miserabilist trope out of the arthouse drawer – a domestic worker struggles with homesickness and faces economic inequality – and upcycles it with warmth and wit to make something quite original.

This film is more unique and outstanding than any other film shown at this year’s FESCAAAL [The African, Asian and Latin American Film Festival], not least because of the audaciously creative way it intertwines and overcomes the distinction between fiction and documentary.

Paz González doesn’t hide how interested she is in Lina as an entry point into conversations about migrant labor, about wealth and privilege, about women’s lives of quiet desperation... But rather than let such themes dour and sour the mood of the film, the documentary filmmaker, here directing her first fiction film, goes for ebullience.

What Gonzalez and Solier are most intrigued by is the ceaseless pull between responsibility and desire, and how the smothering limitations put upon women to be everything to everyone leave inevitably leave them desiring so much more.

Despite its intimacy, watching Lina from Lima is ultimately a passive spectatorial experience. Musical fantasy operates as Lina’s release and escape from the banalities and harshness of everyday life. Why should González use Lina’s life to emotionally reward us?

Though Lina from Lima is largely a realist drama, occasionally, Lina’s drab world will explode into flamboyant song and dance. These sequences are over-the-top and fun, as if out of a film much soapier than the one we’re watching, but while they’re fun to experience as they are for Lina, there’s something sad about their fakery.

It’s an engaging but rather slight story, given heft by a sensual central performance from Peruvian actress Magali Solier and sparkle by the fantasy musical sequences which are threaded into the fabric of the picture.