Gastón Solnicki’s formally audacious, A Little Love Package, is one of the more unique films in the already innovative Encounters section of the Berlinale. Our favorite ending of the festival that exudes the simplicity in life.
With the Encounters section aiming to showcase aesthetically and structurally daring works, Gastón Solnicki’s A Little Love Package plays with its form with its simplistic nature. It’s 2019 in Vienna and the smoking ban in cafes has officially begun. Angeliki Papoulia, a resident is accompanied with her friend Carmen Chaplin to help her decorate her new apartment in Vienna. Characters loosely related to Angeliki and Carmen weave themselves in and out of the story, but the film’s plot (if you would call it a plot, more of a reflection and critique on what we take for granted) falls back to the result of the smoking ban in cafes.
Narration by Mexican writer, Mario Bellatin, he acts as our guide in these dumbfounded times. He narrates/sings most of the in-between transition storylines that fall between Angeliki’s story. As far as Angeliki’s story goes, Solnicki’s introduces more characters all related to that one prized possession that occupies oneself as part of the journey of yearning. As the film loses one social activity that seemed like nothing, Solnicki’s replaces it with many individual desires. This film’s dense look at being simple, while being grand in theory, creates a straightforward look at happiness, while adding to Solnicki’s idiosyncratic style.
What now shifts the structure of the film, Solnicki’s goes to the point of view for the new item. In one section, a cheese that is so perfectly aged and stored that it should only be eaten during a funeral, was seized at customs. While another section introduces a rare meteorite from Mars that landed in Morocco. These rare scenarios juxtapose Angeliki’s hesitancy on spending any money. In one scene, Carmen berates Angeliki for her lack of generosity by not spending anymore at all. What she used to find wonder and appealing for the product has gone away.
It’s still no wonder why Angeliki is here, nor should it matter. The film does traverse into Carmen’s background, in scenes where she visits her family. That trip contains a look from the outside within, a judgmental look from the country to the city. Although the children and elderly lead the scenes, a poignant discussion on changing in one’s habitat brings us back to Angeliki and her journey. In one of the concluding scenes, the restaurant explains the process on his favorite breakfast, a boiled egg. A simple, yet satisfying indulgence. And right after, Angeliki asks how is his mother, a follow up of curiosity and empathy. Although some of the individual parts are scattered, the ending song “Wonderful Life” by Black, satisfies each of our pleasures and in a tight 80-minute film, that the ordinary is extraordinary.
