Whereas Tona rests within the bed room, his sisters and nieces scramble round the home in anticipation of company. Between baking truffles and combating over time preparing within the lavatory, the chaos of the family accommodates a well-recognized familial nostalgia. It’s the everyday conversational motion between bickering, gossip, and catching up that’s inherent to internet hosting a household occasion. However over the course of the movie, the emotional stakes start to flood the air, permeating the area with a more moderen, deeper stress and cracking away on the household’s facades.
“Tōtem” has a surprising do-it-yourself high quality. Seeming to be virtually completely shot handheld, we really feel as if we’re a fly on the wall in moments of sweeping intimacy and blanket innocuousness alike. Every of the movie’s characters, from Sol to her aunt Nuria (Montserrat Marañon), are given a lot emotional subtext that we are able to discover ourselves, each in historical past and current, relevant to their strategies of coping and understanding. This depth is accounted for not by express dialogue, however quiet moments of solitary conduct which are entrusted to the beautiful performances of the actors.
From Nuria’s hyper-fixation on Tona’s cake to her self-isolation and incapability to be within the second, we witness her restlessness: vitality in determined want of an output turns into positioned wherever tangible. For Sol, the movie accommodates an animal motif that runs adjoining to her expertise as she collects snails, converses with parrots, and muses on lethal snakes and the wing energy of hummingbirds. A reminder of nature’s dominance, these animals discover their manner into the home area, getting into the house with the identical creeping tempo because the looming destiny of her father. Sol’s interactions with them change as she involves grips cognitively. She begins by shifting the snails deep into the crops exterior of her dwelling to purposefully lining them up on the partitions, an virtually acceptance of the inevitable.