Review: Lost in the Night
- CANNES 2023: Ten years after receiving the Best Director Award, Mexican director Amat Escalante returns to the Croisette with a strong, but surprisingly tame, effort
Ever since The Untamed [+see also:
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film profile], also sits comfortably at the intersection between libido and death drive. If we can agree that the Mexican filmmaker has a “signature” way to deal with a recurring motif, this would be the eruption of violence across divisive lines, be it class or species.
For a while, it seems like Lost in the Night is perpetually beginning. While its very first scene sets a gloomy tone with shots of a luxury lake house (very recently abandoned), the following one introduces the political context. A small town in Mexico, a meeting between people and officials, and a hopeless dilemma: to support mining, or to protect the homeland and local jobs. It comes as no surprise that after a woman activist takes a stand to radically oppose mining on the town’s land, she is trailed, beaten and kidnapped: all of this happens in the space of just a few minutes. In the next scene, a sort of a third opening introduces the film’s actual protagonist, Emiliano (Juan Daniel García, who is tough but not alienating), the son of the activist who disappeared.
Three years later, Emiliano is now in his late teens. Guided by a sense of justice and revenge, he comes across a clue that could lead him to those who are to blame for his mother’s disappearance: there is strength in his silence and the way he vocalises anger, but not hope. This is the state we find him in as he volunteers for a job at the house of a wealthy family, whose name was passed on to him in secrecy. At first, the Aldamas seem perfectly innocent, caught up in their own daily troubles: provocative artist Rigoberto (Fernando Bonilla) and his pop-star wife Carmen (Bárbara Mori), their small children, and sandwiched in between, there’s Mónica (Ester Expósito), a local Gen Z Instagram celebrity.
Escalante is certainly not interested in telling one single, simple story. On the contrary, Lost in the Night can gallop through themes and events without lingering on any of them for too long. Snippets of lives are embedded in passing comments, undisclosed desires are sublimated into violent foreplay, and simmering conflicts are only made apparent at gunpoint. Thankfully, it’s the characters, not the audience, that are left in the dark, as we’re granted a privileged position to oversee how all of the contradictions intersect.
Continuity poses a challenge in this tangled plot, and editor Fernanda de la Peza has done a marvellous job of matching the tempo to the inner lives of the characters, instead of their circumstances. With the dynamic camerawork by Adrian Durazo (Robe of Gems, Our Time [+see also:
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What initially seems like an infiltrate-and-avenge story is actually less of a social critique, and more of a meditation on the depths of trauma and desire: for life (ie, sex) and for death (ie, suicide). The fact that there is no through line to follow makes Lost in the Night effective as both a thriller and a psychological drama, without relying on depictions of violence to convey exactly how forceful the command of one’s inner trauma is. Within the family dynamics of Escalante’s cinema, hardly anyone is left unscathed.
Lost in the Night was produced by Mexico’s Pimienta Films, Tres Tunas Cine and Carcava Cine, in co-production with the Netherlands’ Lemming Film, Germany’s Match Factory Productions, Mexico’s Sula Films, Denmark’s Snowglobe, Switzerland’s Bord Cadre and the UK’s Sovereign Films. The Match Factory handles its international sales.
Photogallery 19/05/2023: Cannes 2023 - Lost in the Night
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© 2023 Fabrizio de Gennaro for Cineuropa - fadege.it, @fadege.it
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