Alejandro Loayza Grisi’s debut feature, Utama, which is set in the arid Bolivian highlands, unfolds a visual potency indicative of its writer-director’s prior work as a photographer and cinematographer. With this film, Loayza Grisi has made less a work of slow cinema, despite its languid pacing, than a series of solemn, striking compositions that occasionally dip into moments of magical realism and unsettling suggestions that an unseen force might be lurking and awaiting its chance to strike. One may wish that there were more of such moments across Utama’s short but increasingly monotonous runtime.
Virginio (José Calcina) and Sisa (Luisa Quispe) are an elderly couple living in a small village. As part of their daily grind, Virginio tends to animals—mostly llamas—while Sisa fetches water from nearby wells. But the area is beset by drought and Virginio is suffering from a nagging cough. So when the couple’s grandson, Clever (Santos Choque), pays them a visit, it’s only natural that he wants his elders to leave the highlands for the nearby city, where water and medical care are readily available. Attached to their land and simpler way of life, the couple, but Virginio in particular, want to stay, even if it means dying in the process.
Loayza Grisi uses that basic premise as a jumping-off point for often remarkable shots of the Bolivian landscape by award-winning cinematographer Barbara Alvarez (The Headless Woman, The Fever). Still, Utama is meant to be a film and not a photography exhibition, and on that level Loayza Grisi seems unsure how to engage the senses beyond the visual.
The film’s drought narrative offers largely predictable moments of Sisa unsuccessfully pumping water from a well and a later sequence in which a llama is futilely sacrificed to the rain gods. Early on, during Clever’s visit, Virginio blasts the boy’s father for not coming himself to encourage their move to the big city. Stock story beats of generational dispute run throughout Utama, existing mainly to show off the widescreen possibilities of the Scope frame.
Utama ends up suggesting a training-wheels version of both Ozu Yasujirô’s Tokyo Story and Shindô Kaneto’s The Naked Island, two deeply suggestive works that cover comparable narrative terrain about rural versus urban life. In the case of Tokyo Story, fully realized depictions of tragic family conflicts intersect with a study of the cultural differences between its characters that often moves from humor to solemnity in a single scene. And The Naked Island wrings intense drama from its characters’ repetitious lifestyle, while also being filled with extraordinary cinematography of a small island in the Seto Inland Sea.
Utama, by contrast, borders on being suffocatingly studied and humorless. In the end, the film’s potentially greater power comes more from its images and moments of borderline surreal suggestion, as in a scene where Virginio has an encounter with a large colorful bird, than from its braiding of people, circumstance, and place across its 87-minute running time.
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