La Soledad

The image of crum­bling con­crete, des­ic­cat­ing into pow­der and falling into the wind, sits at the cen­tre of Jorge Thie­len Armand’s lilt­ing lament for time’s inex­orable onward march, La Soledad. In this case, how­ev­er, the promise of restora­tion and renew­al is notable by its absence, as this is a film which offers an inti­mate sur­vey of a des­per­ate Venezue­lan under­class whose eco­nom­ic sit­u­a­tion grows ever more dire by the day.

Amand doesn’t direct­ly lam­bast his country’s geopo­lit­i­cal woes or make hyper­bol­ic state­ments about a gen­er­a­tion cur­rent­ly slip­ping through the gap­ing cracks of a soci­ety in need of a hard reboot. Instead, he takes a once-grand old house as his focus and mon­i­tors the lives of those who have adopt­ed it as a tum­ble­down sanc­tu­ary. The build­ing was once owned by Amand’s grand­par­ents, but it now shel­ters a fam­i­ly descend­ed from age­ing maid Rosi­ta who do their best not to expe­dite its destruc­tion. But this is tough, as there’s the con­stant feel­ing that the whole place could cave in at any moment.

It is, in some ways, a hushed haunt­ed house movie, as the ghosts of inhab­i­tants past hang thick in the air and their phys­i­cal pres­ence can be felt in the pic­tures left hang­ing on the walls and in crum­bling pho­to albums, aban­doned by fam­i­lies past. In one strange scene Rosita’s grand­son Jose inspects a wall which clear­ly has some­thing liv­ing inside it. Lat­er on, he is seen try­ing to make an hon­est buck the only way he knows how: by care­ful­ly scan­ning every inch of the over­grown grounds with a met­al detec­tor in search of buried trea­sure. What he even­tu­al­ly digs up offers a shock­ing reminder of how close he and his fam­i­ly are to death – a vio­lent solu­tion to ease their suffering.

In the back­ground, wide­boy locals blurt that it’s time to make rake in the dol­lars by kid­nap­ping tourists, and there’s only so long that Jose can resist the temp­ta­tion and abide by the rule of law. On the sur­face, La Soledad appears diplo­mat­ic and hope­ful in its sug­ges­tion that there are still peo­ple in Venezuela who haven’t yet resort­ed to vio­lence as a means of sur­vival. How­ev­er, as the rain falls and the build­ings tum­ble, it’s only a mat­ter of time before vio­lence becomes a neces­si­ty rather than a last resort.