"Blue Eyelids"
(2009, Ernesto Contreras)
Average Contributor Rating:

Marina Farfas (Ernesto Contreras) is a down on her luck sewing girl who works for a uniform company. Victor Mina (Enrique Arreola) works for an insurance company and lives alone. Both are lonely, without friends, and without significant others. Marina wins a holiday to a beach paradise, and when she runs into Victor (who happens to be an old school friend who she has forgotten) at a café, she soon realizes that he is the only person that she can ask. Romance buds and grows, but their social inadequacy and general uneasiness make the relationship difficult to continue.

I was really surprised with how much I enjoyed “Blue Eyelids”, the debut feature length film from director Ernesto Contreras. For the first hour and a bit, at least, it’s a sublime piece of filmmaking. I don’t want to be all pretentious and elitist by saying ‘especially for a romantic comedy’, but in a world where films under that category are often neither romantic nor funny, it is a fitting way of putting it. Although the laughs don’t really come at a high rate, when they do they are oddly hilarious, particularly the commentary of an old woman who – after wetting the bed – proclaims that she “hasn’t done anything so innovative in years”. The humour is certainly gentile, and it goes for long stretches without even trying to make you laugh, but all the better for it. In these sequences, the romance is built upon, but not in a corny and clichéd way that Hollywood romcoms often do so. It grows organically from almost nothing (a chance encounter, actually), and the filmmakers never try to shove this sweet, awkward romance down your throat, which is a rare commodity within this slightly less worthy subgenre.

What Contreras does do is build his characters brilliant. I’ve been noticing in all too many films recently that a character will just blurt something out about themselves and hope to be understood, as if characterization has been reduced to its most basic form. It’s an annoying, obvious, and grating trick that jolts you out of a cinematic experience almost entirely. “Blue Eyelids” doesn’t treat its audience with such patronising dumbing-down, and instead builds its characters like they did in the olden days. A character is developed through silent, lonely stretches, or conversations with friends, or chance meetings with strangers, not by going on monologues about what makes them who they are. Contreras does this especially so with his leading pair, Marina and Victor, investing almost the entire screen time on these two characters. The two people, and the relationship between them, is brilliantly done, and a sweet romance between two sympathetic, lonely characters that never once verges on being sickly is something that is all too rare in romantic comedies nowadays. How remarkably similar these characters are is no co-incidence, particularly in their alienation and their loneliness. One key scene really sums up Victor’s character, and it’s the one where Marina calls up his company to speak to him. It’s great for two reasons, and the second is outlined later in the review, but the first is because it says so much about the lengths of this man’s loneliness without explicitly saying it. When we are shown that no one in this big company recognises Vincent’s name, images of him sitting alone in the canteen, making solitary cups of coffee, or being ignored at Christmas parties were conjured up in my mind. I know that, if shown on the screen, all three of these things would have annoyed me, and I would have called them clichéd, but the fact that Contreras can say them without actually saying them is beautiful, moving, and intelligent. As for Marina, the fact that she cannot remember Victor or anybody else from school for that matter is tragically telling; she is letting life pass her by without garnering any memories.

Contreras’ direction is also very good. He uses zooms and reverse zooms to great effect, sending his camera towards a character when they feel once again connected with society, and drawing away from them when they are become more and more alienated from it. The director draws from some of my favourite films for a couple of his sequences, which was a nice touch which I appreciated. The scene where the couple independently masturbate, miles apart from each other, over the other, is most probably a nod to “L’Atalante”, and the scene where Marina calls Victor’s insurance company only to be constantly passed from department to department is clearly a reference to Kurosawa’s masterpiece, “Ikiru”. He scores his film beautifully, never once letting the music create a false sense of hyperbole or cheesiness. The slow, deliberated beats, often contrasted with conventional popular music, works wonderfully, creating either a slow build or an affirmation with society respectively. He also colours his film very well, using cool blues as his foundation and drawing a vivid, colourful world around it. It’s both a shame and a miracle, though, that he is upstaged by his leading pair. Enrique Arreola, as Victor, is confident but down-trodden. He’s had a life filled with refusals and break-ups, and now he’s almost given up trying. The star, though, is Cecilia Suarez, who portrays a nervy and nuanced girl who – and I hate these comparisons but it’s undeniable – comes across as a Mexican Audrey Tautou. She’s charming, attractive, yet somehow accessible, and the slow burning romance between the two – that intelligently says that love depends on compatibility and not lust or idyllic settings – is beautifully drawn, and her pitch perfect performance is one of the major contributing factors for that.

As you can tell, I had a great time watching this film, but it is not without its flaws. A subplot involving the owner of Marina’s uniform factory is underdeveloped and, let’s be honest, a little bit rubbish. The absence of a supporting cast is a shame, and the relationship between Marina and her sister is a little bit obvious, underdeveloped, and clichéd, and the role of the sister could have been a little meatier if it was fleshed out a little. The final moment, as well, kind of gives in to conventions and clichés a little too much for my liking, and although I am all for a happy ending, this level of happiness just verges on the unreasonable. But I still left the cinema with a smile on my face, assured that I had watched one of the five best films of 2009 so far (going by UK release date). If your other half wants to see a romantic comedy at the cinema this week, do yourself a favour and go see this one. You can thank me later. . JB.
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