Lit­i­gante

Time stops, or takes on a new form, when some­one we love is suf­fer­ing from an ill­ness which may very well remove them, phys­i­cal­ly, from our lives. Sim­ple domes­tic deci­sions sud­den­ly become gar­gan­tu­an enig­mas of how to keep every­one (and your­self) hap­py – should I be con­tin­u­ing with my life, doing my job and tend­ing to my fam­i­ly, or should I be giv­ing myself over to that per­son who is in dan­ger of expiring?

Fran­co Lolli’s hushed, per­cep­tive Lit­i­gante tells of Slivia (Car­oli­na Sanin), a bureau­crat at a large con­struc­tion firm who is in the midst of fire fight­ing against accu­sa­tions of cor­rup­tion. As jour­nal­ists cajole her for details and talk as if her com­pa­ny is clear­ly cul­pa­ble, her male boss shrugs his shoul­ders in the hope that he can do a lit­tle more to tuck away those mis­ap­pro­pri­at­ed pub­lic funds.

In one scene near the mid­dle of the film, Sil­via is chewed out by her boss for not being able to keep her home and work life com­plete­ly sep­a­rate. As a sin­gle moth­er with an errant five year old and moth­er requir­ing con­stant and intense treat­ment for lung can­cer, it’s not that her boss’s request is a tough ask, it’s clear­ly an impos­si­ble one.

First time actor Sanin plays Sil­via with an abra­sive, prac­ti­cal edge – she’s some­one who is task dri­ven and wants to make sure her time is divid­ed equal­ly between all the key fac­tors in her life. The sto­ry of Lit­i­gante is per­haps about cir­cum­stances that cause her to shift more towards becom­ing a hub of empa­thy with­in her fam­i­ly, and away from the prospect of becom­ing a pat­sy at work.

The unfussy cam­er­a­work, focus on the human play­ers above their sur­round­ings, and an attempt to cap­ture a fair­ly (but not whol­ly) unstruc­tured slab of life does make this sound like a lot of oth­er mod­est, admirable domes­tic dra­mas, but in shift­ing away from hyper­bole and unnec­es­sar­i­ly mer­cu­r­ial plot­ting, much of the emo­tion can be expe­ri­enced and under­stood with greater ease.

As Silvia’s moth­er Leti­cia (Leti­cia Gómez) is cart­ed back and forth between home and hos­pi­tal, her hope­ful sug­ges­tion of using dried fruit as a way to cure her can­cer trans­forms from ini­tial­ly com­ic to even­tu­al­ly traf­fic. As Leti­cia grad­u­al­ly comes to terms with her ill­ness, the film takes on a more som­bre hue, its zenith reached in an extreme­ly mov­ing sequence where the daugh­ter shaves her mother’s head – a sig­nal per­haps of the point of no return.

But then light­ness streams straight back in, as Silvia’s imp­ish son Anto­nio (Anto­nio Mar­tinez), unfazed by his grandmother’s with­ered appear­ance, stomps into her room to give her a big kiss good­bye ahead of a day at school. It’s a film which, in the moment, feels low key and mean­der­ing, yet the sense by the end is that it’s just one that wears its care­ful pre­ci­sion very lightly.