A quirk of fate pitches a professionally stressed single mother into an unlikely love affair in an affecting drama from Colombia
There’s enormous tenderness in this drama of disillusion from Colombian director Franco Lolli – but also an overwhelmingly unsentimental sense of life’s seriousness and painfulness. In the leading role, Lolli has cast a non-professional: his cousin, the author and academic, Carolina Sanín, and she is outstanding. With every gesture, every moue of weary patience, she conveys the awful strain her character is under.
Silvia is a single mother in Bogotá. She has a stressful
Job as legal counsel to an arrogant, slippery public official, who is clearly scheming to let Silvia take the blame for a recent perceived irregularity in public spending. She is also having to deal with her difficult and cantankerous mother, Leticia (played by the director’s own mother, Leticia Goméz), who has terminal
cancer, and with her young son, Toni (Antonio Martinez), now being bullied at school for not having a dad. The mystery of the absent father is something that the film will coolly reveal later.