The Desert Bride is perhaps too finely crafted, too tidily composed. With clever and calibrated filmmaking, co-directors/co-writers Cecilia Atán and Valeria Pivato, tell the story of their protagonist, Teresa, with a form that matches Teresa’s characteristics. In other words, form and narrative coincide more or less perfectly. The result is double-edged: The Desert Bride is flawlessly and breathtakingly constructed, but it is as limited in scope as the woman at its center. It is an undeniable formal achievement, yet is that enough to make it worthwhile?
Teresa (Paulina García) is a middle-aged housemaid who has diligently worked for the same family since coming to Argentina from Chile as a young woman more than three decades ago. She is being reassigned from Buenos Aires to a different branch of the family in the more isolated city of San Juan, in the distant west of the country. On the way, her coach breaks down. Teresa and the other passengers are required to march across the desert to the nearest village to await a replacement bus. While passing the time, Teresa misplaces her luggage, which contains all of her meager earthly possessions, in the camper-van of a traveling merchant known locally as the Gringo (Claudio Rissi).
In the second act, Teresa tracks down the Gringo, and the two set off across the desert landscape retracing his steps in search of the lost bag of Teresa’s belongings. What results from this sojourn is something of a period of self-discovery for both characters, who are polar opposites in their approach to life: Teresa has barely left Buenos Aires in the past 30 years and the Gringo is an itinerant salesman who never stays in one place for more than a day or two. They are wanderers in the desert, pulled out of their routine in order to ponder the human condition—one of the oldest and best tropes in world literature.
Within this classic trope, the storytelling matches the characteristics of Teresa. It is unambitious in scope, incurious about details begging for deeper exploration and quiet unless needled into discussion. Just as Teresa has a quite myopic view of things, so does the cinematography skew towards shallow focus. The many beautiful landscape establishing shots of the ponderous Argentine desert are carefully symmetrical, to match Teresa’s tidy and uncomplicated outlook. As a result, The Desert Bride is a remarkable film and one where the influence of the directors is obvious in every scene.
But is putting the audience in the worldview of Teresa the best way of telling this story? Teresa has not had an interesting life—almost certainly, this brief peregrination in the Argentine wilderness is far and away the most exciting thing that has ever happened to her—and she is, as a consequence, fairly boring. The Gringo has thousands of tales to tell, in contrast, and his manic aversion to rootedness appeals to movie-viewer sensibilities more than Teresa’s staunch sense of singular purpose. Yet, Atán and Pivato are committed to their protagonist, and they weave a compelling yarn centered in her limited sensibilities. While The Desert Bride frustratingly never ambitiously reaches for more story, its fidelity to Teresa and her shortcomings does make quite a statement.
Furthermore, The Desert Bride is a film that is well aware of its own cultural place. It is a female-helmed production from the Southern Cone. As such, it makes several overt references to Lucrecia Martel, especially to her The Headless Woman. Unlike that film, The Desert Bride is not a political allegory about the Dirty War past of Argentina. Instead, The Desert Bride dissects gender expectations. Teresa, it seems at first, lacks personal agency out of her sense of fear of the unknown and loyalty to her employers, while the Gringo’s expansive experience is a direct result of his more masculine, freewheeling sensibility; he trusts himself to get out a jam. What the film so neatly does—again, formally speaking, The Desert Bride is flawless, so everything it does it does neatly—is pull these gendered notions apart. It suggests that perhaps Teresa has more agency than meets the eye on first glance and that the Gringo is not so autonomous and self-reliant as it seems. As they wander in the desert in search of truth, the film offers to the audience an argument about the gender prejudice behind our notion of personal agency and what makes a literary protagonist. This is a different species of “the political” but it is reassuring to see Atán and Pivato take up Martel’s mantle and push the envelope of both Latin American cinema and culture forward in such daring fashion.
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