Totem

Director: Lila Avilés (Mexico, Denmark, France). Year of Release: 2023

The inside of a public toilet. A girl is taking so long to do her business that her mother pisses in the sink. A voice from the outside shouts, urging them to hurry up. Mother and daughter giggle. The girl is wearing a clown wig and a red nose which is making it difficult for her to breathe. The pair leave the toilet and get into a car filled with balloons. When one of the balloobs bursts, the mother, Lucia, asks her daughter Sol to make a wish. Sol’s wish: “for daddy not to die”.

Lucia drops Soll off at Lucia’s father, Sol’s grandfather’s, house. After the pair’s moments of relative tranquility, the house is full of commotion and bustle. Sol’s sisters-in-law are there with their families. Alejandra (Ale) has hired a shaman to cleanse the house of evil spirits in a ceremony which involves waving around burning bread rolls on a stick. Nuria is in the kitchen with her daughter, Esther, trying to bake a cake. Esther is scared of clowns and asks Sol to take her wig off.

In the background, grandfather Roberto is speaking to his psychiatrical patients through his voicebox. Uncle Napo arrives with a present for Sol – a goldfish. Sol’s reaction is to remark that when an earthquake hits, fish are the first to be aware due to shocks in the water. This apparent non-sequitur is typical of both Sol’s inquisitiveness and her slightly morbid streak. We see this again, when Sol is alone with a mobile phone – she asks Siri when the world is going to end.

Meanwhile, Ale’s teenage kids are playing video games, and trying to get out of cleaning chores, each claiming that it’s the other one’s turn. Ale’s daugher complains that she’s always asked to clean because of institutional sexism. Nuria has now started to hit the booze, and is struggling baking her cake. The first one went up in flames, so she’s trying again with one which she will decorate with a picture of Van Gogh’s Starry Night.

Sometimes it feels that there are too many characters for us to keep up. But one figure is missing from the bustle – Sol’s father Tona, whose birthday they are supposed to be celebrating. Tona is dying of cancer and is resting in his room, being looked after by his nurse, Cruz. As his family argue downstairs about the need for Tona to restart his chemotherapy – using obscure word constructions so that the kids don’t realise what’s going on – he is suffering upstairs.

Tona is a painter, and many of his paintings hang inside the house. Sol amuses herself by taking snails from outside and attaching them to the paintings. She is an intense, inquisitive kid, who must be about 7 years old, but is full of wisdom – and grief as she prepares herself for the imminent death of her father. It is a spectacularly nuanced performance byNaíma Sentíes, through whose curious eyes we view most of the film.

Tona only appears about half way through the film. Sol has been patiently waiting outside his door, desperate to see her father. Cruz is not so sure that he is ready for so much excitement, but eventually she decides that he is well enough to see Sol. Both father and daughter look overjoyed, especially after he presents her with a painting of her and a load of animals. HeTona gingerly makes his way downstairs to join a garden full of friends and relations in the festivities.

Totem is a strange little film, where nothing much happens, although you could argue that next to the immenseness of Tona’s expected death, nothing else really matters. And yet at the same time, it often feels like too much is going on. The immense house is full of people making preparations, and fussing about other family members. Occasionally, you feel the need to ask them to just slow down a little just so that you can keep up with what is going on.

More serious subjects keep popping up from beneath the surface. Despite (or possibly because of) the large house, the family is struggling for money. Cruz has not been paid for 2 weeks – which creates resentment among other family members when Ale organises the expensive cleansing ceremony. Roberto asks why they need the big party in the first place, and you get the feeling that, for more than one reason, they won’t be having another such party soon.

All the characters are well acted. Each character is well rounded and perfectly capable of carrying a different film on their own. At the same time, you sometimes think that maybe less would be a little more. On the one hand, the absolute chaos of what is going on shows a multitude of responses to an inevitable event of Tona’s death – something which no-one feels able to confront. Sometimes you feel that Sol, has better coping mechanisms than most of them.

The family is approaching an imminent crisis, and everyone is trying to find their own way of reacting. They are all flawed, and all less important than the event that they are trying – or not – to confront. Ultimately, Totem is a film which is more concerned about what is happening off-screen. This means, among other things, that I would perfectly understand someone who cannot get on board with all the effort, and would just love the film to be a little more concrete.

I’m not sure whether Totem is trying to tell us something, or whather that matters. It exists, which is pretty much all it needs to do. Sometimes you don’t need films to explain the world, but to show you other lives and how they are lived. If that’s what you need from a film (and there are much worse things to wish for), then Totem has done a good job. It’s not a film for every occasion, but if you need some quiet contemplation amid a burst of manic energy, it may be worth a visit.