Estela (Valeria Lois) and her mother Clota (Rita Cortese) set off from the town of Junino, where they live together, to the coastal town of Costa Bonito, almost 600 kilometers away, to see the apartments left by Estela’s late father. Estela is a woman in her early or mid forties (from the eye) who has never married and has no children, but she lives with her old mother who is one of those typical grandmothers of about seventy years. Right at the start we see that she is not going anywhere, the sea is those typical grandma’s worries that someone will break into their house while they are gone, constantly grumbling and complaining. She acts like that typical current mom who literally sucks energy out of her daughter and in the first part this minimalist drama by Paula Hernandez works at least as much as a comedy, like “Las Siamesas” or “The Siamese Bond” drama.
But as time goes on and as Estela and Paula approach the destination by bus, there will be less and less reason to laugh, and this film will turn into a finely crafted drama about family relationships. In the previous film “Los Sonambulos” Hernandez dealt with family relationships, but this intimate drama in which we have practically only three characters (with mom and daughter there is also a conductor on the bus) somehow worked much better for me. As the title of the film suggests, it will soon become clear to us that the mother-daughter relationship is quite unnatural. Both actresses are great in their roles, and by the end we will slowly understand the reasons why Estela decided to choose such a life and why she was left alone and whether it is solely because her mother probably spent some life passively – aggressive form of guilt and fear or Estela is largely to blame for it herself.
Whether the mother was the reason why this happened or caring for Estela’s mother was always a good excuse for the fact that she never managed to separate from the mother to whom she seemed to still be tied by some invisible umbilical cord. The story unfolds very interestingly here and it was a much better and more interesting film than I initially assumed. It was “Las Siamesas” a complex and extremely interesting drama about family relationships that was also stylistically performed very well. So in the beginning the camera is mostly static and the framing is kind of unusual and the camera seems to catch them from a frog’s perspective, and later, as the situation develops and dynamizes, the camera will become more lively and will often move from stand to hand. .
