Amalia Ulman’s El Planeta is a confection full of arsenic, a deeply felt dramedy whose droll humor and placidly beautiful black-and-white surfaces mask a searing socioeconomic desperation. Ulman, who also stars in the film as the quirkily stylish Leonor (or Leo, as the young woman prefers to be called), explores the grim, impoverished reality lurking behind her main characters’ aristocratic façades. And she does so with a breezy melancholy that’s precisely attuned to the blithe spirit of Leo and her mother, Maria (Ale Ulman, the filmmaker’s real-life mom), who treat their hand-to-mouth lifestyle as a kind of game. Or, at least, they try to—grifting, shoplifting, and bluffing their way from one day to the next while acknowledging the true direness of their situation only in jokey asides, such as Leo’s quip that “If I keep eating carbs, I’m going to have a poor person’s body.”
Of course, it’s hard to avoid carbs when a gifted box of pastries provides your only means of subsistence for days on end. But Leo and Maria, who share a cramped apartment in sleepy Gijón, Spain, don’t spend all that much time thinking about where their next meal is coming from, much less figuring out how to earn any money to pay for it. Maria’s barely labored a day in her life, while Leo, an aspiring fashion stylist, finds that her only lead on work—styling Christina Aguilera for a photo shoot in New York—would cost her more in airfare than she would receive in pay. In El Planeta’s caustically funny opening scene, Leo finds herself making a half-hearted foray into sex work, meeting up with a skeezy older man (filmmaker Nacho Vigalondo) who offers her far less than she was expecting to take a piss on him.
Mostly, though, Leo and Maria just kind of exist, lazing around their flat, playing around on their phones, and occasionally making shopping—or, rather, shoplifting—trips to high-end clothing stores. While there’s a general narrative arc to the film, mostly hinging on Leo and Maria’s increasingly precarious financial situation and the strain that it places on their otherwise tender relationship, Ulman doesn’t adhere to rigid plot conventions, allowing us to live with her characters across a series of languid, mostly light-hearted episodes.
In one episode, which is emblematic of El Planeta’s delicate balance of irony and emotion, Leo is courted by a charming shop attendant (Zhou Chen) with whom she shares a pleasant but ultimately regrettable date. Across a scene that plays out with the subtle comic rhythms of one of Hong Sang-soo’s trademark drinking scenes, Leo and the shop attendant share a long dinner during which they get sloshed, but Ulman, with a series of jump cuts, maintains an amusing vagueness about whether or not the two are actually having a good time.
El Planeta’s premise, as well as Leo and Maria’s lovable eccentricities (the former’s oddball sense of style, the latter’s penchant for putting curses on her enemies), brings to mind Grey Gardens. Stylistically, though, the film—a brief, bittersweet comedy of human behavior observed with a relaxed yet intently focused eye—is much closer in spirit to the work of Hong and Philippe Garrel. El Planeta’s playful touches, like funky wipes, a noodly keyboard score, and pillow shots of the ornamental bric-a-brac that litters Leo and Maria’s apartment, are in whimsical counterpoint to the film’s clear-eyed naturalism. Ulman nods toward Spain’s recent financial crisis, contrasting the crushing weight of poverty with a lavish upcoming gala for the Princess of Asturias prize, at which Leo and Maria plan to rub elbows with luminaries such as Martin Scorsese. Wealth and contentment, the film suggests, are an illusion that can be maintained by wearing fancy clothes, carefully curating your Instagram content, and never letting anyone see you sweat—even when you’re about to be evicted from your home.
Ulman, though, never allows such broader socio-political issues to dominate El Planeta. This is at heart a film about a mother and daughter, whose gentle, lived-in ease around each other is no doubt borne of the actresses’ real-life relationship. When the two explode at each other after the power in their flat is cut—“You’re being a hysterical little shithead,” Maria snaps, “I’m sick of you”—the scene has the caustic ring of truth to it, as does a later parallel moment when the two reconcile by (what else?) taking a trip to the mall. One gets the sense that these two could weather just about any storm as long as they have each other, and yet as long as they remain so closely bonded, it seems unlikely that they’ll ever get out of the rut they’ve found themselves in. Ultimately, though, the path forward is not theirs to choose. With surprising abruptness and abiding ambivalence, the film’s final moments remind us that the game Leo and Maria have been playing with their lives must inevitably come to a close.
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