Tótem Review: Lila Avilés’s Tender Portrait of the Power of Love in Spite of Tragedy

Sol (Naíma Sentíes) is getting ready to go to a party. In a crowded public restroom, her mother, Lucia (Lazua Larios), tells her a story. “This is the moment when she sings to the heavens,” Lucia reminds her daughter, asking her if she remembers the rest. A mesmerized Sol responds, “Is that when they kill him? When something bad happens?”

Sol is seven years old, and even when the charismatic child isn’t on screen, Lila Avilés’s Tótem is largely told through her perspective. Early on, she and her mother travel in a compact car stuffed to the brim with a rainbow’s offering of massive balloons. Bursting this animated scene of matrilineal bliss is Sol’s held-breath wish underneath a bridge that her father not die.

Tótem is a film of unexpected beauty, using Sol as a conduit for exploring the quandaries of a family navigating matters of love, heartbreak, class, innocence, and, perhaps most prominently, mortality. What her father is dying of and how soon begins as a kind of mystery. In place of fast answers, Avilés’s camera moves to the rhythms of youthful discovery and impending grief, in the process opening a searing window into one middle-class family’s love for one another.

The party in question is for Sol’s father, a painter named Tonatiuh (Mateo García Elizondo), and it’s hosted by the girl’s grandfather, Roberto (Alberto Amador), who speaks in short bursts with the help of a battery-operated electrolarynx. Cancer, it seems, runs in this family, as Roberto’s wife died of the disease years earlier, and his son, who’s nicknamed Tona, is about to meet a similar fate. And while he looms large over Tótem, the young father is mostly absent from much of it, while Sol searches for him in the twisting corridors of the family home.

Even at its most opaque, Avilés’s willfully mystifying portrait of this home, at once a site of joy and tragedy, is illuminated by Sol’s purity of purpose and curiosity about her father’s conspicuous absence from his own birthday party. “Sometimes I feel like my dad doesn’t love me when he doesn’t want to see me,” she tells her father’s confidant and nurse, Cruz (Teresita Sánchez), and, because Avilés withholds just about as much information from the audience as she does from Sol, the film feels wrapped in a cellophane layer of ambiguity.

Tótem’s portrait of familial harmony and the threat of its collapse is stitched together from lovely little scenes of domestic life. In one instance, Tona’s sister, Nuria (Montserrat Marañon), tasks her preschool-age daughter, Ester (Saori Gurza), with cleaning the top of the refrigerator, where the girl sits perched with her pet kitten and a cup of coffee. Even in a moment like that where Sol isn’t visible in the frame, it still feels as if the film is informed by her perception of grand questions that she’s only beginning to understand. Like the star that is her name, Sol suggests the center of a vast, carnivalesque swirl of characters and their movements.

Tótem has the tactility of a fly-on-the-wall documentary, capturing the equivalent of still lifes throughout: the piles of dirty plates that litter the cramped kitchen counter; the loud clown wig that Sol wears with impunity; and the spiritualist who walks from room to room, waving bundles of stick and, later, a burning bolillo loaf in order to ward off harmful spirits. And those shards of incident that are captured here are tied together by the film’s title: The central plot involves people facing an inevitable death, but symbols of life cycles dot the story, as when Roberto is seen pruning a bonsai tree in the moments before his family’s arrival.

Tona’s outdoor party resides somewhere between the celebratory and funereal, and where an interlocking web of family and friends face down what it means to live a life, and what it means to die. All the while, Sol’s wide-eyed naïveté stands in stark contrast to the adult characters who anticipate Tona’s death with a mix of denial and shame. Sol’s love for her father is matched only by her stumbling grasp of his impending death, and the film warmly and seamlessly clues us in to the way all of us, big or small, struggle to fold death into our experience of life.

In Tótem, Avilés doesn’t shy away from the bittersweet devastation of her own film’s premise. In place of a miracle, Avilés gently assures us that, with an abundance of friends, family, and, yes, even the mystical assistance of flaming bread, death can be approached with wistful hope. It’s easy to do that when actors are in such perfect sync with a film’s aesthetics, moving and breathing, arguing and laughing, focused on the ways our loved ones stick around, even after the final bell. As Tótem closes in on its astounding final moments, an arresting physical silence ushers us through. What stories of our suddenly empty space might we tell the next generation?