Review by Beatrice On 20-Aug-2023
Why work if I can do it for you?
So reads a billboard where a costumed woman is comfortably reclining on the shell of the birth of Venus.
The advertising message looms over a very poor suburban Lima neighborhood where servants live.
And although Dio sabe mi destino, the rush to work, going from one bus to another becomes frantic every day.
Luzmilla and Peta are two sisters who perform the same duties in parallel in two neighboring villas where the "aristocratic" owners, Alicia and Carmen, spend their days on the phone arranging family intrigue.
Breakfasts in bed, massages, memory teachers.
Classism and prejudice is everywhere, even among relatives of the same families gathered for Alicia's birthday, who awaits the return from Spain of her gay son, currently engaged to Merche, a lovely girl who is an actress.
She is the very embodiment of the secret kept from their respective neighboring families for long years, decades.
Findings such as the double shots between the villas, aimed at depicting the cloying parallelism of the friends' behaviors, the presence of a "doll house" in the garden as a place of preservation and testimony of dustily hidden unspoken words, are surely the most original aspects traversed by this tragi-comic comedy with continuous ironic flashes.
The matriarchal structure of the story, the almost irrelevant presence of the male figure except in homosexual dynamics, constitutes the script's other gimmick.
As in Nuevo Orden, a Mexican film presented at Venice 77, here too, outside the luxurious villas, the reality of the people triggers a protest with tear gas being thrown even into the armored properties, although the gentlemen claim that "protesting for anything is not helpful in understanding that to get by, one must work even on Sundays."
Just as in Rodrigo Plá's The Zone, where the bourgeoisie of Mexico City, are protected in their little gardens with villa and ready to lie and kill in order to safeguard their wealth, the same script is repeated in Lima's Best Families, that of a South America portraying the economic divide produced by the capitalist system.
And in the cinematic cutaway, the hypocrisies, the respectabilities of the ruling families are highlighted while in the background the "rebels to be arrested" march through the affluent neighborhoods.
Javier Fuentes Leon argues that the film is a mirror of reality, and one has no trouble believing it: the recolonization taking place in the metropolis is the status quo produced by capitalism, and representing it in the form of a sarcastic telenovela is evidently effective: everyone would like to ring the servant's bell, even the daughter of the servant and the master, and even where the Hegelian self-consciousness of the servant becoming master of the master fails to transform the reality of the master becoming servant of the servant.
The only part of the so-called national wealth that really comes into the possession of the collectivity of modern countries is the public debt
Hypocrisy, classism, amorality, alienation, unhappiness, and ignorance are the ingredients of a funny and bitter comedy in lgbt sauce.
Theincipit is exactly repeated in the ex-post: there is no room, much less place, for any change; revolution is out of focus, peripheral and marginal. Nothing can scratch nothing if economic strategy is a closed loop.
Becoming is under the banner of the Cat's Motto: Everything changes so that nothing changes."
Between two equal rights, who decides? The Force
Reason has always existed but not always in a reasonable form
20-Aug-2023 by Beatrice