Strangers Connect in Mexican Charmer

Fernando Eimbcke’s fifth feature, Moscas (Flies), opens with a loose string of vignettes. Teresita Sánchez —  a 2022 Sundance Special Jury Prize winner for Dos Estaciones, also known for her roles in Lila Avilés’ The Chambermaid and Tótem — plays Olga, a weary-looking middle-aged woman who wakes up to the insistent buzzing of one of the insects that provide the title, gets out of bed with an indignant sense of purpose and sets about trying to shoo the pest out a window, or better yet, kill it. When her initial efforts fail she resorts to insecticide, nearly asphyxiating in a toxic cloud of her own making.

No sooner has the buzzing stopped than her ears tune into a different irritant, the upstairs neighbors, in the middle of what sounds like vigorous sex. Which interferes with her usual pastime of playing Sudoku on her boxy old desktop. Olga turns up her television to drown out the noise and soon falls back to sleep, this time on the sofa.

This kind of low-key observational comedy and incisive character definition is what Mexican director Eimbcke does best, giving the impression that he might have thrived as a filmmaker in the silent era. It harks back in many ways to the captivating debut feature about adolescent ennui that put him on the map in 2004, Duck Season, not least in its appealingly unmanicured black-and-white aesthetic.

Like that film, Moscas favors short scenes unfolding in static shots (María Secco served as DP), with highly selective use of tracking sequences. It’s a movie whose relatively simple means of communication give it a disarming emotional directness.

Olga is very clearly not living her best life. She’s unfriendly with neighbors, borderline rude with the woman running her local diner and seriously displeased when the elevator in the brutalist concrete-slab apartment block where she lives in Mexico City is out of order yet again, forcing her to schlep up many flights of stairs. When a podiatrist tells her she requires a minor surgery that will set her back 3,000 pesos, money she doesn’t have, Olga puts out a “Room for Rent” notice like many other residents in the building.

The balance of droll humor and melancholy is different, but there’s nonetheless a kinship here with the neorealist films of Vittorio De Sica, especially once 9-year-old Christian (Bastian Escobar) enters to share protagonist duties with Olga. But it’s there also in the burdened faces and unfancy clothes of people flooding into the huge hospital complex across the street to visit ailing family members each day. The fact that many probably live out of town explains the market for short-term rentals close by.

The economy of Eimbcke’s storytelling means he doesn’t need to push the hard-luck humanity angle to paint a vivid canvas describing the socioeconomic reality of this sea of people.

Two of those people are Cristian and his loving father Tulio (Hugo Ramírez), who does his best to soften the gravity of the situation for his son. The boy is reluctant to accept that children are not permitted inside the hospital wing where his mother is being treated. His father’s long absences during visiting hours give him a lot of time to kill.

Tulio responds to Olga’s rental notice and is undeterred by her sour manner as she tells him she doesn’t want to hear about sick relatives. Given that it’s a single-occupancy arrangement, Tulio has to sneak Cristian in after Olga goes to bed at night and then out before she wakes up in the morning.

The script, penned by Vanesa Garnica (who co-wrote the director’s last feature, Olmo) and Eimbcke, seems fully mindful that its set-up points to predictable developments — that Cristian’s clandestine presence will be discovered; that his mix of guilelessness and cheek inevitably will crack Olga’s hard shell. But there’s too much depth of feeling for Moscas ever to feel contrived or cute. Eimbcke doesn’t shy away from sentimentality, but the emotional honesty and unfailingly light touch of his work prevent it from becoming saccharine.

When Olga sees Tulio with Cristian at the diner, she instantly puts two and two together, her suspicions verified by a quick search through her renter’s bag. She gives them two days to find another place to stay. But Tulio is forced to take a job to pay for his wife’s medications. That leaves Cristian alone with Olga for long stretches, ignoring his dad’s strict instruction that his movements are to be restricted between the room and the diner.

Eimbcke’s films have always been distinguished by his strong work with children and adolescents, but Escobar is a real discovery. He conveys the uncomprehending sadness and frustration of a kid separated from his mother, his craftiness at finding a way around people and his short attention span, which allows for welcome distractions. The most frequent of these is a video game called Cosmic Defenders outside a convenience store (a thinly disguised version of Space Invaders); its pulsing electronic pings supply the closest thing Moscas has to incidental music.

There’s gentle humor with poignant undertones in Cristian’s tireless efforts to talk his way past staff at the hospital’s visitor check-in window, and in the friendship he strikes up with easygoing orderly Isaac (Enrique Arreola, memorable as the pizza delivery guy in Duck Season), whose attempt to sneak the kid in costs him. Eventually, Cristian wears Olga down until she agrees to pose as a relative and accompany him on a visit. But that plan collapses when they learn that the boy’s mother has been transferred.

The contents of a locked closet in Olga’s apartment suggest an earlier time when she wasn’t alone there, a contributing factor to her closed-off nature and a reason she might either keep her distance from Cristian or be involuntarily drawn to him.

Sanchez’s subtly modulated performance doesn’t require any big emotional displays to reveal the causes of Olga’s slow transformation from a grouch to a friend with protective maternal instincts. But the delicacy with which she hints at news Cristian doesn’t want to hear and his angry reaction to it make for a moving conclusion, pulling on the heartstrings without the need to be aggressive about it.

Even lovelier is a late touch of magic realism involving the Cosmic Defenders machine, a whimsical embellishment that’s also a tender acknowledgment of the odd ways in which children process sorrow.