The Wonderful Country

On Carajita (Silvina Schnicer and Ulises Porra, 2021)

(This text was written during Guadalajara Talents Press in June 2022 and published in Spanish in Butaca Ancha http://butacaancha.com/carajita-silvina-schnicer-ulises-porra/ on May 8th, 2023)

Carajita (2021) is a film codirected by the Argentinians Silvina Schnicer and Ulises Porra. The movie shows a caring relationship between two women that ends violently. Sara (Cecile Van Welie) is the daughter of a Dominican bourgeoisie family. The teenager lives suffocating because her keen sensibility makes her aware that in her social class there is something shady which tries to hide between the orchids and the plants in the flamboyant house she inhabits. Meanwhile, Yassira (Magnolia Núñez) is the domestic worker in that mansion, living far away from her daughter Mallory (Adelanny Padilla). She establishes an intimate bond with Sara, becoming some sort of surrogate mother for the young woman. In the middle of the plot, there is an accident with fatal consequences for Mallory. 

Schnicer and Porra’s film is far from being an account of a mother’s mourning process or an insightful portrait of the Dominican class struggle. Instead, Carajita is a sordid stylization of an unrecoverable division between human beings. Fear can be felt in the movie. The characters experience it for many reasons (even opposite ones), and they remark it in their dialogues. Fear feels like holding your breath under water with a rock attached to your body which drags you into the deep: fear is knowing that there is a possibility of not coming back alive. The opening sequence exemplifies this experience. Sara is submerged in the ocean. The turquoise water, the holes in the fossilized coral and the rough sand create a luminescent image. But fear is not as shiny as those opening frames. Emotions vanish in that incandescent appearance. The contradiction of Carajita lies between that feigned form and the oppressive reality it tries to show. The characters’ lack of complexity, along with stylized scenes as those in the opening sequence, lead to an emotive anesthesia. In the end, the fear that spreads through the movie is the fear to otherness, which happens between the characters and in the way they are filmed as well. The other one is always dangerous: a threat. 

In a distant long shot, Yassira seats defeated in a restaurant. “La vida no vale nada” (“Life Is Worthless”) is playing. The painful idea of this lyrics is present in the film’s spirit. In Carajita, life is worthless because it can be bought or because, when it is lost, money tries to compensate it. Sara’s father covers the expenses of Mallory’s death. After a denial, one of her cousins eventually accepts. The teenager’s parents are disgusting beings; they are satellite characters that always appear in the frame’s border, which shows the distance that exists between them and the others, even their own daughter. For example, towards the end, Sara cuts her finger with an oxidized iron. The mother asks her if she is vaccinated against tetanus. That gesture demonstrates a deep ignorance about her daughter that contrasts directly with the intimacy between Sara and Yassira, where they share themes that go from the romantic to the eschatological (“Does she fart with you?” “Yeah haha”). 

The film portraits the upper-class people as despicable and despicable only. For them, being on time to a frivolous party is more important than mourning a young woman’s body. This representation becomes cartoonish when they are in a yacht. One of them shows a sexual video with one of his lovers and the rest watches grisly. The characters’ attitudes and dialogues in the sequence show subjects for whom bodies, even those of their peers, are exchangeable and can be shared indecorously. How gruesome these characters are cause such a deep disgust that nuance disappears. In addition, this demonstrates the fear in the register: the rich are horrible villains and nothing else; they are not even human. All these dissolves a systematical problem ­–the complex class struggle in Dominican Republic– and leaves far behind the possibility cinema offers to show human beings with dignity, despite everything. 

There are two moments which are some sort of vanishing points where the film escapes its recurrent dualism. The first one is during the party sequence, when Sara and Mallory chat. Their encounter is tense: it goes from awkwardness to mutual sympathy, from mistrust to compassion. The dialogues reveal truths that modify the perception of someone close entirely: “You know nobody calls her Yari? That’s your family thing. Everyone knows her as Santa in the neighborhood,” says Mallory. In other words, Yari is not –or at least not only­– who Sara believes she is. Cecile Van Welie’s hypersensitive gestures reflect the discomfort of knowing this fact. The second moment happens during Mallory’s funeral. The camara pans to follow the family singing goodbye to the girl. This movement renews the frame constantly and always shows the characters in collective shots. These two moments, although briefs, convey a sense of community (even a ritualistic one). However, they are not a counterbalance for a film that tries to portray perversity, but it ends up spreading it, by means of a stylization that distances and reveals a lack of interest in the other, whomever this might be.