Modernist
literature can be trouble. It will
ultimately undermine Julio and Emilia’s relationship, even though Marcel Proust
brought them together in the first place.
Unfortunately, he suspects she was the one when looking back on their brief
affair in Cristián Jiménez’s Bonsái (trailer here), which opens this
Friday in New York at the IFC Center.
We
are told right up front, one of the former lovers will die and the other will
continue living a lonely existence. As
the film opens, Julio and Emilia have been apart eight years. Sleepwalking through life, Julio interviews for
a temp job typing a famous novelist’s longhand manuscript, but prices himself
out of the gig. However, when his
neighbor and reluctant girlfriend Blanca shows an interest in the project,
Julio starts faking it, passing off his writing as that of the celebrated
Gazmuri. He only learned the bare bones
premise, which bears a certain resemblance to his ill-fated relationship with
Emilia.
When
they met as students of literature, Julio pretends to have read his Proust to
impress her. Reading out loud soon becomes
a courtship ritual for them, but a passage from Macedonio Fernández lodges a
subconscious impulse that will sabotage their short but intense romance. While Bonsái
seems to establish the objective reality of these flashback scenes, it
still plants the seeds of doubt. Indeed,
déjà vu runs rampant as Julio thinly fictionalizes their star-crossed love (or
so we assume).
Rather
faithfully based on Alejandro Zambra’s novella, Bonsái’s Proust references are clearly not haphazard, consciously alerting
viewers to the importance and fallibility of memory in Julio’s reveries. The past (whether real or imagined scarcely
matters) clearly hangs heavily over his present.
Jiménez’s
approach is more graceful than gimmicky, preferring subtly to clunky
post-modern gamesmanship. However, the
deliberate vacuity of Diego Noguera’s Julio and the self-absorption of his two lovers
leave a bit of an emotional void at the heart of the picture. Still, Hugo Medina, seen briefly as the crucial
Gazmuri, brings a welcome zestfulness to the cerebral proceedings.
