IN HER PLACE – Review by Nadine Whitney
Award-winning Chilean documentarian Maite Alberdi’s debut foray into fictional filmmaking is not a grand entrance. Rather, it is a relatively muted affair that doesn’t really know if it wants to be a mystery, a feminist awakening, or a slightly quirky ‘what if?’ story.
In 1955 in Santiago, Chile, Mercedes (Elisa Zulueta) is an intelligent and competent woman living with her husband Efraín (Pablo Macaya) and two almost grown sons in a tiny apartment/photography studio. She works as a legal secretary for the likeable Judge Veloso Aliro (Marcial Tagle). Her routine is to sort out her husband and sons’ breakfast, help Efraín set up the studio for portrait photography, and rush out the door, work and come back to feed them again.
Mercedes is asked to gather the judge from his private club (‘No salesmen or ladies allowed’) to attend what seems to be a crime of passion at the exclusive Hotel Crillón. The crime is clear cut. A woman has shot dead a man in front of many witnesses. The shooter is novelist María Carolina Geel (Francisca Lewin), and the victim is her wealthy lover Roberto Pumarino Valenzuela.
Such a crime among the Santiago elite becomes a media sensation. Mercedes glimpses the blood covered but impeccably dressed Geel (real name Georgina Silva) being led away by officials. Mercedita (as she is called by the judge and his assistant – a diminutive which is familiar and slightly infantilising) is struck by Geel’s lilac coat and calm demeanour. Geel refuses to tell anyone why she shot Roberto in the face multiple times. Later when Mercedes asks her directly, she responds, “I’m here for my acts. It doesn’t matter what I say about them.”
The judge doesn’t want to make any snap decisions on a case so closely monitored by the public, so he sends her to a facility run by nuns called Buen Pastor outside of Santiago. Mercedes is tasked with packing clean clothes for Geel who is now called Georgia by almost everyone. She is given the keys to her beautifully decorated apartment, filled with books, art, fine clothing – Mercedes looks at the life she wishes she had.
Plenty of people have opinions about Georgia. Roberto’s brothers both believe her to be a gold-digger. One suggests she acted out of jealously. People who worked for Pumarino think of him as a wonderful boss, and Georgina who worked for him as a stenographer, as a petulant child who looked down on them while writing her “silly stories.” One of Roberto’s brothers spits, “The woman was very independent, like women are these days.”
Alberdi uses the bones of the actual Geel case to examine the fictional Mercedes’ feelings of being permanently stuck. Mercedes is more talented than her husband Efraín in the art of photography. Mercedes gradually moves into Geel’s apartment which becomes her fantasy space. A place where she can escape the constant demands of the men in her life and simply think. She finds herself imagining herself not as Geel, but as a woman with the perceived ‘freedoms’ she has mentally ascribed to Geel before her arrest. Mercedes doesn’t know the woman, and when she meets her, Geel is pleasant but secretive. Mercedes envisions a version of Geel who is complex but allowed to “make her own freedom.”
Maite Alberdi’s interest in the case itself is cursory and stands mostly by the facts available – which are limited as Geel was freed after a petition by Nobel Prize winning poet Gabriela Mistral to President Campos. The real story is Mercedes and her desire to be more. A visitor to Geel’s apartment says to her, “Those of us who are bored with ourselves need a place we can be.”
Although In Her Place is beautifully shot, especially Mercedes’ dream or imagined sequences where she connects her own frustrations to Geel’s and her need for independence to hers; the film doesn’t have a strong identity. Elisa Zulueta is very strong as Mercedes – a woman who loves her husband and sons but feels she can’t breathe. When her husband finally tracks down where Mercedes has been going, he tracks mud into the apartment, meaning that even there she must work to clean up after him.
In Her Place fails to find a balance between its tones. It has comic and whimsical overtones, but it also points to a darkness in Chilean society where women are regarded with suspicion if they don’t stay in their place. The reason the judge finally sentences Geel is that she publishes a successful book from prison ““Carcel de mujeres” (“Women in Prison”) and he feels that his empathy has been taken advantage of.
In Her Place, being mostly fictional, had the opportunity to reach further than it does. As it is, the movie is pleasant but forgettable. A missed opportunity to dig deeper into Chilean society in the mid 1950s and the place of women there.
