Bélgica Castro, Claudia Celedón, Catalina Saavedra, and Alejandro
Sieveking in Old Cats

Growing old with a good husband and a bad daughter

Old Cats has a wonderfully lived-in setting and the cast feels right. The writing is a bit extreme and you will not be surprised to learn that the favorite plays of the screenwriter (co-director and regular collaborator Pedro Peirano) are Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Sometimes it feels as if the dialogue is an obstacle to the wonderful acting, especially of Bélgica Castro, who plays opposite her real-life husband, Alejandro Sieveking, in their apartment, with their own wise and patient and overweight cats. (The filmmakers not being beyond a bit of symbolism, we're meant to see that everybody is some kind of "old cat.")

Thirty-something Chileans Silva and Peirano have teamed up for three films, Peirano generally doing the writing and Silva the directing. They've worked with these same actors, famous in Chile. This time they turn from a upper-bourgeois family's abuse of their live-in servant in The Maid to the perils of aging along with ne'er-do-well offspring. The main focus is on an old couple. Isadora (Bélgica Castro) is becoming forgetful and having strange episodes of zoning out, mainly when she's around water. (Men dressed as bees also seem to have an odd effect on her.) Isadora and second husband Enrique (Sieveking) are visited for tea by their abusive, tiresome daughter Rosario (Claudia Celedón, the mistress in Silva's 2007 The Maid), who's just back from a trip to Peru. Understandably, they don't want to see her. Nor are they happy to receive Rosario's butch lesbian lover, who now calls herself Hugo (Catalina Saavedra, the stony-faced maid in the previous film).

Rosario, herself not getting any younger, is a perpetual freeloader. This time she wants the old couple's apartment, an unpretentious but lovely one, with many nice decorations -- and the cats. Isadora is supposed to sign the place over to Rosario and move into something smaller and at ground level. That part makes sense: Isadora has bad hips and the flat is seven flights up. When the elevator is on the blink, which it often is, she's trapped there. Isadora is not meant to be left alone with Rosario, but Enrique and Hugo run off to get some pastries, and an emotional fight between Isadora and her daughter leads to trouble, and then a kind of resolution.

It's nice to live in a small country where you can engage the services of some of the best actors in your films. Such are Claudia Celedón and Catalina Saavedra, who are even more arresting as lesbians than they were as mistress and servant; (Saavedra has a more minor role here, and Celedón a bigger one as the daughter from hell.) Bélgica Castro and Alejandro Sieveking are veritable national institutions -- Castro is an acting giant who has played great roles and established her own national theater; Sieveking is a well-known playwright as well as an actor. Their generosity in lending their own digs to the production (and those emblematic cats) is a huge contribution. When they wake up in their own bed as the film begins and take their pills, well, it's beyond authentic. The hardest thing is to play yourself, but Castro and Sieveking are equal to the task. More than that, Castro shows further generosity in so convincingly embodying an old woman who is much more challenged than she is in real life (though her trouble with the stairs, it seems, is real).

The daughter is not so well conceived. It is the language of Rosario and her and Hugo's coke-snorting in the bathroom that seem strained and a little irrelevant. Her words and actions spoil the slow developing sense of what Isadora is going through. The partly ironic feel-good conclusion additionally seems a bit forced, and reminds us that so much of the talk has been unreal.

The young Silva and Peirano may have only an inkling what it's like to grow old, but they do deserve credit for knowing how to hold our attention. And a lot of us would be lying if we said our family lives hadn't been a horror show at one time or another. Whatever Became of Baby Jane? may be camp, but Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is simply heightened reality.

Seen and reviewed as part of the New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center, October 2010. Details of other releases and festival screenings unknown.

_________________
©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.