Empty Nest (El Nido Vacio)
Wednesday, January 14th, 6 PM
Thursday, January 15th, 5:50 PM
Museum of Fine Arts,
465 Huntington Avenue
co-presented by the Boston Jewish Film Festival
more information
Daniel Burman's Empty Nest (El Nido Vacio) is a steadily somber film punctuated by moments of extreme joy and visual expressionism. Largely a domestic story, the movie follows Leonardo (Oscar Martinez), a successful playwright, as he navigates the breakdown of his personal life. His is the subtle breakdown of children moving away and ebbed romance rather than the sudden, dramatic breakdown of marriage, and, as such, it requires a different sort of language than the high theatricality of a Revolutionary Road. There's the need for a tenderness and emotional restraint, and Burman treats his characters with detached love even as he moves them into surreal places.
Empty Nest is a sensuous film about perception, those peripheral voices and sights that stay like shards in our minds, and suggest secondary meanings. Our protagonist is always watching like a good flaneur, the hero of the modern realist novel, hearing shards of voice, almost disconnected aphorisms, or, increasingly, smelling. The smell of smoke marks stages in his life, while the phantom of perfume intoxicates and propels him.
The tactile nature of senses come to be significant as the movie blurs perspective and plays with our understanding of reality. But unlike movies concerned with the line between reality and fictionality, Empty Nest tries to be playful throughout, both in the sense of child's play and the playwright's creative imagination. While we may wonder what is real, the fun isn't to be had in the teasing out of what's "actually" happening, or the uncovering, but in the experience of moments that are true no matter if they exist or not.
Yet this reactive, sensing nature also stilts the movie, and though the acting by Cecilia Roth (Martha, Leonardo's wife) is excellent, the first half of the movie is dull while the director establishes the aesthetic of perceiving. It's not until Burman starts to change the formula with an elaborate, almost musical number half-way in that the movie begins to open up, and not until a trip to Israel to visit one of their absent children that all the elements of the film come together. It's there that Burman finds the visual means to make his metaphors function and Leonardo stops going through the motions (or "dances" to use one of the movie's double meanings) and truly interacts with other characters.
The result is a largely uneven film that succeeds as a statement on creativity and less so as pure movie going experience. There is plenty to admire in Empty Nest, and plenty to enjoy as well, but the two don't necessarily go hand in hand, and the lasting feeling is a wish that Burman had started to change the movie earlier.
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