There are shades of Peter Bogdanovich’s 1973 Depression-set comedy Paper Moon in Argentinian director Iván Fund’s melancholy road movie The Message. Aside from crisp black-and-white cinematography and a backdrop of financial crisis, this is a film about a family of grifters profiteering from the sale of hope. In Paper Moon this involved the sale of inscribed bibles to grieving widows desperate for a memento of their late husbands. The premise of The Message would appear to be even more callous: this ragtag trio roam the countryside with a little girl who can commune with animals, alive or dead. But while this, on the surface, would appear to a con on a par with the Nigerian Prince phishing scam, Fund’s film is going for something altogether more spiritual than that.
The little girl is Anika (Anika Bootz), who travels with her guardians Myriam (Mara Bestelli) and Roger (Marcelo Subiotto) in a camper van that barely fit two adults. Quite what the relationship is takes some time to become apparent, since Myriam is too old to be her mother, and Anika calls them by their first names. When we first meet them, their sleep is disturbed by a man with a turtle — although Anika’s bread and butter is cats and dogs, the gift she has enables her to “connect with the soul” of any living creature, which will later include a hedgehog and, most memorably, a capybara.
The massive sum of 12,000 pesos changes hand (around 12 bucks) and the three get back on the road. After pausing to pick corn on the cob from a cornfield, their next stop is a pet cemetery where Anika communes with a dog called Snoopy. It’s a strange, itinerant life, and it’s hard to know exactly how well paid it is. Roger and Myriam both have their trinkets, which seem pretty high-end for carny folk, and Roger always seems to have a thick wad of cash, which could suggest either hidden wealth or hyper-inflation. They even have a website, it later transpires.
These are some of the myriad ambiguities that hold one’s attention on what would otherwise be a very slight story. This even extends to Anika’s gift, which, we’re told, runs through the female line of her family: When Myriam takes on a new client, she doesn’t exactly give them the hard sell. Anika’s “second sight”, or whatever it is, manifests itself in random ways, sometimes in color, sometimes in sepia, sometime in sensations, and sometimes in aromas. No one bats an eye at this, even when she reports back from a tête-à-tête with Junior the grumpy cat who tells her that, like one of the many surreal assertions from the car radio in Jean Cocteau’s Orpheus, “the housewife hides truths”.
Things become a little clearer when Myriam takes Anika to see her mother — Myriam’s daughter — who lives in a mental hospital, a peculiar detail, left tantalizingly vague, that Fund calls back to for the film’s somehow emotionally satisfying but nevertheless cryptic ending. But though his film could certainly use a little more in the way of narrative and perhaps even context, Fund is probably right to err on the side of mystery, coming to no certain conclusions as to the veracity of Anika’s gift and her family’s motivations for exploiting it.
Instead, it presents an immersive, atmospheric coming-of-age story, showing Anika’s truck-stop lifestyle as a bracing kind of anarchy (the vivid use of the Pet Shop Boys’ “Always on My Mind” momentarily brings some unseen color to the screen). Most of all, however, it is a muted meditation on the meaning of it all. Whether Anika has supernatural powers or not, these people’s lives are very much rooted in the here and now, and they’re trying to live them out as best they can.
Title: The Message
Festival: Berlin (Competition)
Director: Iván Fund
Screenwriters: Iván Fund, Martín Felipe Castagnet
Cast: Mara Bestelli, Marcelo Subiotto, Anika Bootz, Betania Cappato
Sales agent: Luxbox
Running time: 1 hr 31 mins
