Natalia López Gallardo’s great debut feature Robe of Gems offers a mysterious and puzzling look into three Mexican women’s lives and their redemptive process on trauma.
With the only debut feature in this year’s Berlinale competition (Phyllis Nagy had directed a feature length film-to-TV for HBO in 2005, Mrs. Harris), Natalia López Gallardo’s Robe of Gems, is a welcome entry to great debuts and being a potential leading voice in international cinema. As an editor and actor for Carlos Reygadas’ films, Gallardo, sits in the director chair with a compelling, slow-burn thriller of Mexico’s human trafficking and corruption, resulting in redemption and resolution, focused on three women. At first, the composition and sensibility may remind some of Reygadas (wide frame, slow camera movement, long takes), but Gallardo’s elliptic storytelling showcases the underlining corruption and the struggles these women must go through in this unjust society.
Beginning with Isabel’s disintegrating relationship with her husband, where the two are currently going through a divorce, the father will be temporarily leaving for work, while Isabel will be at the villa her grandmother left behind in the country. In this villa, its house helper, Maria, is going through her own major problem, her sister who has been missing for over a year. The last woman involved is Roberta, a police officer of this region. Her son is a young hooligan who is wrapped up and involved in the narco lifestyle, working with the cartel. With the three women’s roles, they all linked together with Mari’s missing sister. Isabel, our main character, has the biggest role as her sense of identity is being discovered with this separation.
Identity is one that is stripped away in Robe of Gems. With Isabel searching within herself and helping Maria, she is oblivious to what she’s getting herself into. Factors of class and skin-color, differentiate the rich and the poor. The light vs dark skinned comparison is on display, while Maria’s problem is more problematic than Isabel’s. The sense of each woman’s problem, are directly related to their class. With Roberta, her passive behavior of sweeping cartel activities under the rug to the relation of her son, is a dead end for her. The search for each woman’s goal is what unlocks the movie’s great screenplay in revealing the evil that lives in this environment.
Gallardo’s use of shifting the narrative between the different women blends itself for the use of her storytelling. She doesn’t overexplain the character’s motives. For example, Isabel’s relationship with her children, or even family is under-explored. Very little is explained between the two, but shapes her character as a human. Same with Maria, who’s reason why she’s a house helper and continues to do so, elucidates that she doesn’t have a choice. Gallardo’s brilliant script reveals a stronger moment in each of the woman’s lives reveal in a much more impactful conclusion.
The evil lurks across this Mexican country side. Where vast lands are laid out for buried bodies, long roads, and the city to the country side. Gallardo’s use of a wide aspect ratio captures these lands, and more often used in Robe of Gems, are third person shots from the back. We see these shots following the person from a third party, following and seeing what’s ahead of them. For the three women, what’s ahead of them in this bleak world, is not something they can change, but deal with, unfortunately. With Gallardo’s direction, this doesn’t fall into a sympathetic misery, but introspection on trauma and difficult story of three women’s lives where, in their world, is not in their favor.
