Reel Hub: The Evils of Love

Maldeamores
@ the Boston Latino International Film Festival
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Ostensibly a love story, Maldeamores is better described as a film about intimacy. It's about the closeness of lovers, that desire to become a part of the other person, and the odd estrangement that comes after you've learned too much and the passions fall away. It's a high-minded ideal that in another movie might have been told in strictly poetic words, but Maldeamores is more visceral, firmly planted in the real loves of ordinary people, and the comparison for falling in love with a woman is drinking beer. Beer is something you grow to appreciate over time; but women--women consume you right away, and it's only later that you begin to dislike them.

The directors' word for this phenomenon is "claustrophobia," and this claustrophobia is often staged on film: in group scenes, the frame is bursting with people, while smaller, one-on-one encounters are jammed into small cars or hidden away on the periphery.

At other times, the setting itself is overwhelming. One character, an elderly woman variously called Flora or Florita, lives in a world of flowers: she wears flower-print dresses, her drinking glasses have flower patterns, and the wallpaper is flowers and more flowers. At times it's hard to tell where the person ends and the walls begin. Her house is her world, and for her, intimacy can came only come by stepping outside or letting someone else have a claim to ownership of her home. Over time, the most intimate bodily functions have for her been thoroughly domesticated, reduced to mundanities. Her problem is agoraphobia rather than claustrophobia. Being so tightly bound in her world has left her incapable of loving, and she can only learn to love by escaping it.