After serving as an editor for Mexican auteurs like Carlos Reygadas (Silent Light, Post Tenebras Lux) and Amat Escalante (Heli), Natalia López Gallardo takes a turn behind the camera with Robe of Gems, a film that bears the imprint of the directors she’s collaborated with while searching rather nebulously for its own distinct voice.
Exquisitely photographed by Adrián Durazo, also making his solo feature debut (he was co-credited on Reygadas’ Our Time), the movie attempts to strike a balance between elliptical art house drama and gritty narcocorrido, with a fragmented narrative set against a backdrop of kidnappings and murders that are not exactly easy to trace.
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Robe of Gems
López Gallardo reveals a keen eye for the destructive beauty of modern Mexico, with bodies popping up in sun-drenched garbage dumps or burning alive on hilltops, bathing in murky swimming pools or gyrating to techno under neon lights. But she tends to eschew straightforward storytelling for something so elusive that her film nearly escapes us for its first half, until the pieces gradually fit together and we manage to make some sense of the plot, if not entirely what the director is going for.
There are two groups of characters to follow at the same time, but rather than explaining how exactly they’re all connected, López Gallardo slowly immerses us in their worlds and only later do we understand, more or less, what has been happening to them.
One clan includes Isabel (Nailea Norvind), a rich “blondie,” as she’s pejoratively called by some people, who’s moved with her kids (Sherlyn Zavala Diaz, Balam Toledo) to the modernist country villa owned by her aristocratic mother. Her husband is around at first but then disappears from the picture, and from what we can tell Isabel is in the midst of some kind of midlife or marital crisis, perhaps both at the same time.
The other group includes Isabel’s longtime family maid, María (Antonia Olivares), who’s grieving over the loss of her sister, whom we come to understand was kidnapped a certain time ago. For unclear reasons, María has been working with a band of narcos that includes the young Adán (Daniel García) — a rising gangster whose own mother, Roberta (Aida Roa), is a policewoman caught up in a corrupt system.
In all transparency, it was difficult to describe the above plot without referring to the film’s official synopsis, and you get that feeling that López Gallardo purposely avoided clarity to make something more cryptic and ephemeral. Certain scenes are shot in such a way that you’re not always sure who’s talking, or whom they’re talking about, as the camera glides around the characters to capture details of life that aren’t necessarily essential to the story.
The opening scene, in which we watch the villa’s caretaker toiling in the garden while hearing strange noises off-screen, only to reverse angles and realize that Isabel and her husband have been engaging in a bout of unloving sex against the window, is a perfect example of the distancing technique used throughout much of Robe of Gems. (By the way, what is “Robe of Gems” even referring to? The title eludes us as well, or at least eluded this reviewer.)
Things take on more focus in the film’s second half, when Isabel decides to go on a mission (ostensibly to help find María’s sister, though again it’s uncertain) and runs into some real trouble of her own. Some of the strongest scenes, at least in terms of the tension López Gallardo creates, involve Isabel facing untold dangers in a land she hardly understands. The class differences seem to run so deep in Mexico that she appears to be a tourist in her own country, or in any case, in the part of the country she’s decided to settle down in.
Such fleeting moments and impressions are not quite enough to pull the film together by the time it ends, leaving us with a vaguely tormented feeling rather than a bang, even if the last image is a powerful one that sticks in your mind. The dual influences of Reygadas, with all the equivocal, stylized directing, and Escalante, with the cruder moments of violence, are evident throughout Robe of Gems, yet it feels like López Gallardo wasn’t able to find the correct path between them. She forges her own bold way, but loses us a bit in the process.
