Graphic
novels and manga can be helpful. During trying times, they can be a source of
distraction, or perhaps even a forewarning of danger. A series about body-snatching
sentient flora will at least provide the former to a moody fan girl in Roberto
Doveris’s Plants (trailer here), which screens this
Thursday as part of Anthology Film Archive’s ongoing series, If You Can Screen It There: Premiering Contemporary Latin American Cinema.
Florencia
(Flor) is clearly going through a rough patch. Her brother Sebastián (Seba) rests
at home, but persists in a vegetative state, while her mother is hospitalized
with a potentially life-threatening illness. Her father lives abroad and
remains intentionally out of touch, so the once-privileged family now faces
desperate financial circumstances. Forced to let go their live-in nurse, Flor must
care for her brother herself. On the positive side, this gives her carte blanche
to cut class whenever she feels like it.
It
is too bad Doveris is not really telling the story of the Las Plantas comic book-within-the-film, because it sounds like it
would be a really cool riff on Invasion
of the Body Snatchers. He could also probably draw a fair degree of
suspense out of the genre elements, judging from his simple but evocative handling
of Flor’s dream sequences. Instead, he is more interested in teen angst—and boy
is there plenty of that.
Before
we go any further, it should be established Flor is seventeen-years-old, just
like the kid in Call Me by Your Name and
still a year shy of the Chilean age of consent. There is no question she is
sexualized in Plants, but it is deliberately
disturbing (rather than romanticized, as in Guadagnino’s film).
For
the record, Argentine pop star Violeta Castillo is twenty-two years-old and truly
remarkable as Flor. It is a bold performance, calibrated to discomfit viewers
by punctuating her coy faux innocence with flashes of fierceness. Ironically,
she receives the most effective support from Mauricio Vaca, who subtly suggests
moments of pointed lucidity as the uncommunicative Seba. They both project
hints of something dark and incestuous shared between the siblings.
Plants will leave viewers
hungry for a sci-fi/horror film about parasitic vegetation. The audience should
also be duly impressed by Castillo’s raw and gutsy screen debut. It probably has
enough fandom references to have earned it considerable play at genre film
festivals during past years, but not in the current, post-Kevin Spacey-Woody
Allen climate. Recommended for edgy hipsters and Castillo’s fans, Plants screens this Thursday (12/14) at Anthology
Film Archives, as part of If You Can
Screen It There (but a lot of us might prefer to re-watch Little Shop of Horrors and Day of the Triffids instead).