Blooming hell

Directed by Claudia Llosa. Starring Magaly Solier, Susi Sánchez, Efraín Solís, Bárbara Lazón, Delci Heredia Club, IFI, Dublin, 95 min

WISEACRES used to propose a theory arguing that it required a massive leap of faith by trusting passengers to keep a plane in the air. If everybody stopped believing the vehicle could stay aloft then, perhaps, it really would crash to the ground.

You may be aware of a similar tension while watching this beautifully made but defiantly peculiar Peruvian drama. Set in a community still quaking from the aftermath of the outrages perpetuated by the Shining Path guerrilla movement, the film concerns a young woman who, after watching her mother die, reveals that she has planted a potato in her vagina.

The tuber has, as I understand it, both allegorical and practical purposes. It acknowledges the outrages visited against her family (the aged mother seems to have been horribly raped) and, though the girl denies this is her intent, it may, perhaps, offer some modest protection against future atrocities. As the film progresses, the heroine trims shoots that emerge from the impacted vegetable.

Winner of the top prize at the Berlin Film Festival, Claudia Llosa’s picture does a fine job of layering its creeping dread with moments of uninhibited humour and indications that the damaged women may yet shake off the family’s traumas. Magaly Solier is spookily distant in the main role, and the leisurely camera seems perfectly in time with the meandering action.

That central magic-realist premise does, however, ask a great deal of any even mildly cynical viewer. The material is too grim to allow guffawing, but, from time to time, the sheer absurdity of the situation threatens to bring – recalling the aeronautical metaphor – the entire enterprise spiralling towards the earth. Keep faith, however, and you should find much to enjoy.