Latin Wave Film Festival
Never too old to shine: 90-year-old Chilean actress Bélgica Castro is a marvelin Gatos Viejos
Latin Wave artistic director Monika Wagenberg has said that this year’s festival is marked by great performances. This is especially true for Gatos Viejos (Old Cats), the Chilean film co-directed by Pedro Peirano and Sebastian Silva. Here, Chilean theater legend Bélgica Castro makes a rare film appearance when she plays an old woman, Isadora, now living in the shadowland between lucidity and dementia. Castro is 90 herself, and she gives a tour-de-force performance as the frightened old woman.
Isadora’s mental plight is aggravated by a pair of challenges. First of all, her needy, grasping, drug-addicted daughter, Rosario (Claudia Celedon) is coming over for dinner, and bringing the woman of her life (Catalina Saavedra) along with her. That would be stressful enough for Isadora, who is far from reconciled to her daughter’s lesbianism. But beyond that, Rosario wants her mother to sign the apartment she lives in over to her. Rosario isn’t above using emotional blackmail to try and manipulate her mother. "You never loved me," she more or less says. "The least you can do is give me your apartment."
But in the moments when Isadora is lucid, she’s perfectly capable of standing up to her daughter. In fact, she’s a cold piece of work herself. In a masterful point-of-view shift, Castro and her co-directors subtly pivot the film’s sympathy away from the mother, and offers a little of it to Rosario, who we see really did grow up unloved, and even unwanted.
The second crisis Isadora faces on this day is that the elevator in her building is out. At her age, when her elevator breaks she might as well be in prison. When she and Rosario have such a terrible fight that Isadora feels she has to get away, she has no choice but to painfully walk down the eight flights of stairs, clinging to the railing as if it were a lifeline. When she disappears into the park across the street, where a fanciful commercial is being filmed (the actors are dressed as bees, and at the sight of them Isadora regresses into childhood), the film takes a climatic turn.
Co-director Peirano is in town to present the film. His account of how it came to be made was fascinating. He and co-director Silva knew they wanted to make a film with Castro, but they didn’t know what the story would be. They just knew that if the 90-year-old was going to be the lead actor, they would have to film inside her own apartment.
“We used her cats, her husband (to play Isadora’s husband), everything,” Peirano said. “We had to make it easy for her.” When they learned that the elevator in Castro’s building is subject to break-downs, and that she truly feels imprisoned when it goes out, the directors realized they had an important element of the story.
The painful scene of Isadora forcing herself the stairs “is real,” Peirano says. “She (Castro) accepted the challenge.” Ironically, Peirano says, it was the film crew itself that broke the elevator with their lugging of equipment and heavy use.
You have to tip your hat to Bélgica Castro: still suffering for her art at age 90, and still doing luminous work.
Gatos Viejos is shown Sunday at 3 p.m. at Latin Wave Film Festival at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.
