‘Tótem’: Poetry in visual about the life, the death and the togetherness of family.
In Tótem, the director Lila Avilés explains the experiences she has crafted in the piece using a birthday party as an event, seemingly a happy one, albeit unspoken words lurked: this is the last birthday for Tonatiuh. There is a noticeable twilight hovering over the aspect of celebration. Avilés employs this challenging straightforward plot to construct a tale of humanity – in its forms of love, loss, and even reconciliation – thus providing a baffling yet therapeutic kind of film.
A Very Delicate Form of Hope
The narrative is revealed through the perspective of Sol, who is the daughter of Tonatiuh, and her child attempts and manages to keep naive optimism despite the knowledge of the harsh realities concerning her father’s illness. Sol’s moment makes her sad, as the little girl asks Siri when the world will come to an end, a question that she’s asking about her world – and it is in fact, a sad world.
Intuitively, Sol knows that the time shocks between her father’s strength are limited and so Tonatiuh concentrates the little remaining bursts into a frenzied creation of a hefty wall filled with animals – the last attempt to immortalize a part of him in Sol’s vision. Such moments create an intimate scene that adds up sentiment to the narrative, where every inkling or act is the mixture of love, passion, bereavement.
An Investigation of loss without being melodramatic
As temperatures rise and change, so does the loss and Avilés is careful not to present it starkly on the screen. In fact, loss is portrayed as an emotion that is embedded deep within and underlying in all the various scenes.
The film becomes capable of incredible emotional twists surprising its audience thanks to its unwillingness to sit idly in the sea of grief.
Tótem encourages the viewers to search for words that are not readily spoken through well-composed images and terse conversations. This minimalistic style of storytelling elevates the average depictions of day to day scenarios to contemplations on the transience of life, and the sturdiness of family ties.
Lost Relationships For A Variety of Different Situations
In the movie Totem, the main characters experience losses differently:
- One member of the family throws themselves into the work of making a cake for the birthday saying ‘making cake is the only thing I can do’ or ‘this is not enough but I want to do something’ and so on.
- A woman, who is trying to make the best of Tonatiuh’s hospital visit, is struggling against social-economical limitations.
- Men, work their bodies to kiss someone as ‘it’s easier than to say I love you. Why not do it?’ For a moment this sufficed these limited characters.
And at times these concepts appear to feature a mix between Sol and other characters as she is asking simple, innocent questions that summarize the predicament in its entirety. This tension of growing resentment is captured beautifully throughout the rest of the film as the audience watches how her father leaves and the time to the hug counts down towards a faint whisper.
Art And Cinema Blended Beautifully Together
Avilés expertly incorporates these kinds of small details into these subtle and delicate moments with attention to the realism in the movement.
The family’s conjoined relationship and experiences are brought to life as the audience is able to witness the organic movement and the use of hidden angles throughout the film. Of odious vocabulary, it would be added that constant quest of the directors is to humanize the place where the action unfolds; therefore, the shot or the object have to be more in focus rather than on the plot. It is the quest for these details that elevates Tótem into a work of any art.
A Film That Stays With You
However, it is the one about the love, the loss, the patience that this world has within its soul and never loses. No doubt they will all end up on the wedding parties offering the puppet drag of sadness to bedeutet the pain of beauty. They easily say goodbye together with the family and the children not distancing themselves, where love pangs retire the pain.
Finally, it builds on and around its beauty emphasizing grief one more time as a beginning of any stimulus throughout any existence. Life as sad but beautiful slices speaks about events that are proving tenderness, sensuality pertaining all things for appreciation and beauty.