Emilio
is about to rediscover the joys of institutional food. The former banker has a hard time adjusting
to life in an old folks home.
Unfortunately, his fading faculties will eventually rob him of the
relationships he forges in Ignacio Ferreas’s animated feature Wrinkles (trailer here), which screens as
part of the 2012 edition of Spanish Cinema Now.
Emilio
has Alzheimer’s, but nobody will tell him that directly. Increasingly difficult to handle, his grown
son has packed him off to a nursing home.
His new roommate Miguel, an Argentinian scammer, has been down this road
before. Still sharp as a tack, Miguel
specializes in conning the more addled residents out of their pocket money and
flirting hopelessly with the nursing staff.
Initially, Emilio is quite appalled by his shameless roommate, but they
warm to each other over time—sort of.
Miguel insists he is actually doing good deeds by keeping his suckers
emotionally engaged on some level. While
completely at odds with his middle class morality, Emilio starts to see his
point.
Adapted
from Paco Roca’s graphic novel, Wrinkles is
entirely honest to its characters and their circumstances, making it a bit of a
tough sell commercially. Nonetheless,
its deeply humanistic spirit is quite refreshing. Avoiding cheap melodrama, it has more quietly
telling moments than most slice-of-life live action indies, let alone the
typical animated tent-pole.
Ferreras,
who served as an animator on Sylvain Chomet’s wonderfully wistful The Illusionist, employs a similarly
sensitive 2D animation that feels reassuringly nostalgic. Some of his richly detailed flashback
sequences are even quite lovely. While
the narrative occasionally resorts to the odd cliché, like the defiant,
doomed-to-fail road-trip, most of the notes Wrinkles
hits ring true.
