Spoiler alert: The last two paragraphs of this review contain spoilers.
“Mamífera” presents 40-year-old Lola (María Rodríguez Soto) having sex with her boyfriend Bruno (Enrique Okér) while standing in the bathroom. Then, they sit on their bed, drying their clothes together, and he, sitting behind her, carefully uses the hairdryer on her hair, at one point playfully directing a blast of warm air down the front of her panties. In this short, intimate sequence, writer-director Liliana Torres conjures worlds of easy, contented compassion between two people who already know each other’s bodies well, but are never tired of each other.
Unbeknownst to Lola and Bruno, their relationship is about to be tested by a pregnancy so unexpected that it is not discovered until the tenth week of pregnancy. It’s worlds away from the experience of Judit (Ruth Ljubis), Lola’s friend, who accidentally tries to conceive via in vitro fertilization, and is caught in a vicious cycle of hormones and the torture of the so-called two-week wait, as she prays for this fetus. The transplant was successful. Of course, there is a terrible irony in Lola’s situation, as she tactfully maintains silence about accidentally granting her friend’s wish.
What the film does well is bring nuance to Lola’s situation. She’s not portrayed as the elegant career type or the hard-living hot mess whose world is usually turned upside down by a surprise pregnancy in Hollywood movies. She is a warm, accommodating and capable art professor, happy in her stable relationship with Bruno, and in the view of many people, including the abortion clinic counselor, an ideal candidate for motherhood. The clinic asks her to go away and think for three days about whether she really wants to terminate the pregnancy before they help her, and it is this three-day period of time that makes up the majority of the film’s running time.
Rodríguez Soto won a Special Jury Award at SXSW for her performance, and it’s not hard to see why. Her take on the character of Lola is the kind of natural, endearing transformation that makes spending time with the character so easy, even during moments when what she’s going through is difficult. She maintains a sense of plausible internal conflict, as the majority of signals she receives from friends and society about the value of having children conflict with her long-standing sense of herself as someone perfectly happy remaining childless.
One of the film’s more bizarre maneuvers is the use of dream-like animation sequences by María José Garcés Larraín, created in a style similar to Lola’s collage-based art, which uses magazine cutouts in a style similar to British artist Leander Sterling. Installation of images. In the animation, Lola’s mental landscape is shown, in which icons of children, relatives, friends, and boyfriend vie for attention, as copies of Lola attempt to navigate her thoughts about potential motherhood.
The other unusual thing about the film – and please look away here if you want to avoid knowing how it will end – is that Lola goes through with the abortion, and that this is not portrayed as something miserable. It’s emotional, no doubt, but the focus is very much on what this choice means for Lola and her life; Emotions stem from this feeling of an important decision that has been made, and what that choice affords, rather than the idea of loss or negativity.
This precision is rare and welcome. There is a strong tendency in the Unexpected Pregnancy subtype to favor a sudden decision, regardless of how the character is initially portrayed, to go ahead with the pregnancy. This is perhaps partly due to political pressure, both overt and ambient, from anti-abortion advocates, and partly to the quirks of structured storytelling, where it can feel as if a character deciding to do something or change the status quo makes the arc naturally more compelling. Kudos to Torres for creating, like the novel’s protagonist, an attractive, warm-hearted model of resistance to those social and official pressures.