These are contacts she can confide in to a point, but who can’t offer her either the requisite practical or emotional support when the chips are down - and the chips plummet despairingly when she finds herself accidentally pregnant by Diego, in a country where abortion is severely restricted by law. Which is not, to be clear, quite the same as loneliness: Ely has friends, colleagues and even a part-time lover in Raul (Diego Cremonisi), the adult son of a veterinarian for whom she works outside school hours. The sheer concentration of the camera’s perspective on her, to the exclusion of so much else, only intensifies her aura of aloneness. Small, salient details like these build up to an urgent portrait of barely-getting-by working-class existence, without the film ever taking on the peering, patronizing gaze of poverty porn. Her depressive, possibly agoraphobic mother (Mara Bestelli) goes unglimpsed for so long that we briefly wonder if Ely somehow lives alone - though the question then persists of why she needs to sleep every night on a threadbare living-room sofa. Her teachers at school, almost as in a “Peanuts” cartoon, are present merely as droning background voices, indifferent to the understanding or otherwise of their students. It’s who you don’t see on screen in “Invisible,” oddly enough, that gradually clues you into the oppressive nature of Ely’s prematurely stalled young life. With its bleaker psychological outlook and more overcast visual style, “Invisible” may struggle to match its predecessor’s buzz-assisted spread of international distribution, but festival programmers will warmly embrace Giorgelli’s long-awaited return.
#Invisible movie trial
That danger makes Argentinian director Pablo Giorgelli’s sympathetic camera cling all the more insistently to her in this no-frills, no-tricks, no-mercy exercise in close-up social realism: Played with marked insight and silent resilience by Mora Arenillas, she’s in practically every frame of the film, her subtle expressive range tested and expanded with every emotional trial thrown at her character.įor Giorgelli, who swept an armful of major festival prizes including the Cannes Camera d’Or for his minimalist 2011 debut “Las Acacias,” his follow-up’s similarly spartan humanism doesn’t represent a significant step forward, but it’s accomplished and affecting on its contained terms. Ely, the unhappily pregnant, perpetually sidelined 17-year-old heroine of “ Invisible,” may not quite live up to the title’s description just yet, but you sense she’s heartbreakingly close to slipping from the world’s view.
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