Word: otilia
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...succulent in the blazing sunshine—echoes in his descriptions of the attractive young family living next door. The object of his desire is Geraldina, a wife and mother of two, whom he admires from his vantage point atop a ladder while picking oranges. His wife, Otilia, notes and censures his voyeurism, but Ismael’s desire is compulsive and extends to every young female character we meet. Each is subjected to his scopophilia, described in terms that evoke the ripeness of fruit; Gracelita, aged twelve, is “almost plump, and yet willowy?...
...Ismael has no part in the processes governing the destruction of his life but is forced to take up the challenge to his faith. When the other inhabitants of San José flee in trucks, Ismael refuses to leave, choosing instead to honor the promise he and Otilia made during the last attack: “Neither Otilia nor I had any hesitation: we were never leaving here...
...rubric by which he lives, we glimpse redemption only in his small acts of imaginative tenderness, as when Ismael decides, in his wife’s absence, to bury the cat that was killed in an explosion, “so that you shall never see your cat dead, Otilia...
...Here you have a perfectly distilled three-character drama. Otilia is the smart one, the audience's surrogate, endangered by the rough Mr. Bebe and, even more so, by her dithery roommate. Gabi has constantly lied to Otilia or Bebe about almost everything: the meeting place, the money, certainly the extent of her pregnancy. She says it's two months, then three; you'll have to guess the actual time. Perhaps Gabi is afraid that no one will help her if she tells the truth; perhaps lying has got this pretty young woman this far, and, now, in this condition...
...strategy, but here it works marvelously, either forcing two characters together as reluctant conspirators or isolating each in his or her predicament. Bebe's examination of Gabi, and his insertion of the syringe, is accomplished in one harrowing shot. There's a bustling scene, at the birthday party of Otilia's boyfriend's mother, that becomes a kind of tour de force - a 7-1/2min. take, with the careless gaiety of the celebrants making the girl's misery all the more palpable. The next shot, off the same duration, lays out the tensions between Otilia and her beau...