As the lights went up following a Q+A showing of Pilar Palomero’s Glimmers, one person raised their hand to ask why despite the movie dealing with typically sad themes: death, illness, divorce, family estrangement— it doesn’t feel sad.
The film, which follows the triangular relationship between a young woman caring for her sick father, and the bringing of her mother back into his life, is narratively simple, and almost never strays from where the viewer expects it to go. Yet unlike most movies that revolve around sickness, it seems to remove itself from any kind of commentary; instead, it feels as if the viewer is simply watching three characters move slowly around the mundanities of their life. The film, rather than exuding emotion itself, seems to place the choice of feeling into the viewers hands, leaving it up to them to extract entirely what they want from it.
The one emotional attempt the film makes that is heavy throughout the course of the film, is the unavoidable notion of the passage of time. In several scenes, there is silence, but for a clock slowly ticking while the camera pans from object to object in the room. The film’s slice of life structure makes it so that time is difficult to follow- periodically, Isabel greets her daughter as she steps off a bus but little is explained about the time between them. This juxtaposes with the wide, empty scenes; large stretches of silence, the focus on the slow and mundane movements of the characters as they move from car to street to room; everything moving slowly, making the viewer pause in a way that forces them to confront their thoughts, in a way that is almost crushingly frustrating given the ever-present sense of losing time.
Palomero makes it clear that she isn’t any of the characters as a self-insert; she states that she is not Magdalen, or Isabel and, though the film pays homage to her own late father, Ramon is not her father. She does say, however, that the succinct small details in the movie are based on her own life, and her father’s life; showing that the film as a mediation on grief — or life, or hope, or loss, or whatever you want it to be — as something entirely personal in a better understanding of loss than most films that attempt to showcase it in certain light. The joy of the film is that it shapes itself around the viewer, rather than existing as a certain kind of object many try to be.
Image provided by CinemaAttic.
