SPANISH FILM FESTIVAL: In Chilean filmmaker Matias Bize’s melancholic unraveling of 30something angst, Santiago Cabrera plays Andres, a 33-year-old travel journalist back in Santiago for a few days after a decade away who attends a birthday party and can’t quite bring himself to stay or go. With stoic acceptance lining his handsome face, Cabrera plays the film’s protagonist as an exile, both physically and emotionally. Based in Berlin, he travels the world documenting tourist trips, and his own life has come to resemble his subject matter: somewhere to visit, not to live.
Written by the productive Bize and Julio Rojas, The Life of Fish trails Andres through the celebration, the camera sticking to him as if it has a gun in his back. Slowly, as Andres faces up to what he has left behind and why, that sense of duress takes a physical form. The opening scene has him hiding out in a bathroom – it’s a very large house, befitting the movie’s sole location – drinking with old friends, whose lives are now caught up in 30something travails, whether it’s nostalgia for their teenage years or the grind of marriage and children.
It’s a cold open, without exposition, and two questions announce themselves out of the banter: 'Did you see her?" and 'What would Francisco have said?" The explanations for both are as you would expect them to be (a former girlfriend, a friend they tragically lost), and the story isn’t always successful in navigating around those large cliches in an original manner. 'Her" turns out to be Bea (Blanca Lewin), Andres’ now married former girlfriend, whose initially polite conversation with him steadily take a deeper course as they re-engage over the evening.
Despite the efforts of cinematographer Barbara Alvarez, who uses a handheld camera to get close to the characters – she shoots them in tight close-ups, studying their faces, with few wider two shots – and allows for lens flare and various layers, such as shooting through a fish tank, to illustrate the stratified nature of Andres’ emotional detachment, it’s the dialogue that is crucial to the picture, and the emotional bearing of Andres and Bea’s conversations are sometimes predictable and overly burnished.
What could be considered interludes, such as Andres sitting with the pregnant wife of one of his friends as she quietly unburdens herself of domestic pain, prove to be more supple, telling conversations. The sharpest exchange is the most casual, as he finds two boys playing videogames in the makeshift coatroom and answers their unusually blunt questions with self-effacing honesty. It’s a scene that touches on the shocking and the funny, and for once it lifts Cabrera out of the hangdog mood that he holds on to rather tightly for much of the film’s economical running time.
Various reunion flick tropes are discussed, including the cold familiarity of social networks and the shared memories that can be both painful and supportive; in this genre, Chile is much the same as New York, London or Melbourne. Still, Bize manages a small twist to what becomes a predictable ending. When the conclusive question, 'Will you be capable of holding me together?" is asked, it’s not by who you would expect.
