Dominga Sotomayor's Cannes Drama 'La Perra' Explores the Complexities of Motherhood and Domestication
Renowned Chilean director Dominga Sotomayor is back at Cannes with her latest film, 'La Perra', a tender drama that explores the complexities of motherhood and domestication. Based on Pilar Quintana's eponymous book, the film stars Manuela Oyarzún as Silvia, a woman whose quiet life on a remote island off the Chilean coast is disrupted by the arrival of a stray puppy named Yuri.
What makes 'La Perra' particularly fascinating is Sotomayor's exploration of the relationship between humans and animals, and the ways in which we project our own desires onto them. In my opinion, the director's decision to adapt the book was a natural one, given her previous work on personal films that took years to get made. As she says, "I wanted to continue our collaboration, and he had a lot of experience with adaptations." This experience allowed her to delve into the complexities of the relationship between Silvia and Yuri, and the ways in which they mirror each other's desires and traumas.
One of the key changes Sotomayor made for her adaptation was changing the settings from the depths of the Colombian jungle to a windy island off the southern coast of Chile. This decision was not arbitrary, but rather a deliberate choice to create a sense of foreignness and otherness. As she explains, "It was important to find the right place because my films have always been tied to their location. When we heard about this island called Santa María, it was such a special encounter because it also felt foreign to me as a Chilean, as it is a place that doesn’t really feel like Chile. It also had a super curious local culture, like every island, so we decided to work the island into the story."
The film also explores the idea of motherhood, and the ways in which Silvia's longing for a child is mirrored in her relationship with Yuri. However, Sotomayor avoids romanticizing the relationship, instead delving into the complexities of delayed motherhood and identity. As she says, "I naturally connected to this idea of this woman who could not become a mother and named a dog after the daughter she never had, but I felt cinema doesn’t need to overexplain. It was more interesting to me to investigate this deeper connection she felt to motherhood. The dog doesn’t stand for a child she never had, but something much more beautiful, which is opening this connection to feelings of delayed motherhood and a search for identity."
A key element of the film is the flashback that ties present-day Silvia to a jarring trauma from her childhood. This chapter of the film is played by Brazilian star Selton Mello, who brings a sense of foreignness and otherness to the role. As Mello says, "I was already a huge fan of Dominga’s work and how she crafts such sensitive films with a very particular, refined way of looking at the world."
The use of the flashback also allows Sotomayor to play with the formal presentation of time in her story, creating an emotional capsule with its own emotional logic. As she explains, "I didn’t want a flashback to work solely as a way of quickly explaining the story that is taking place in the present, but to be an emotional capsule with its own emotional logic. We gave ourselves a lot of freedom with time and space because we weren’t interested in making a documentary. We constructed all the locations and invented an island. I think it’s amazing to be able to invent a geography and a time and to have this freedom to work on the interplay between what is real and what we were inventing about that reality."
Despite the film's success, Sotomayor emphasizes that it is the result of a continuous effort by film producers and the government to support Chilean cinema. As she says, "It is very impressive for a country like Chile, that has a very small, very precarious industry, to have this presence in Cannes. There are only five Latin American films in the program and two are from Chile and directed by women, which I think deserves to be celebrated."
In conclusion, 'La Perra' is a thought-provoking exploration of the complexities of motherhood and domestication, and a testament to the power of cinema to delve into the depths of the human experience. As Sotomayor says, "I find this idea of domestication and the relationship we have with animals to be very interesting. We project so many human feelings onto dogs, but then, in a split second, it bites someone, and we are confronted with the reality that this is an animal, and we can’t control its nature."
