How does the Criterion Channel exist? I don’t want to look too closely. Believing in fairies requires the delusion that fairies exist. A great-movie streaming service is an amazing idea that already failed (RIP, FilmStruck). It’s nice to know other consumers want 25 Kurosawa films, To Be or Not to Be, every kind of noir, and the Czechoslovak New Wave. The Godzilla-Varda demographic needs a home.
It is, however, overwhelming. Any streaming archive daunts you with unfathomable viewing hours. So much old greatness can be depressing. “All the good movies have been made,” Peter Bogdanovich mumbles in Targets, a 1968 movie I just watched on Criterion. I like feeling good about the future, too. So when an amazing new-ish title lands on the platform, it’s worth celebrating.
Tótem released in Mexico last year, and had a limited run in U.S. theaters earlier this year. Bummed I missed it on the big screen. (I guess, err, I.S.S. was calling.) Director Lila Avilés previously made The Chambermaid, a portrait of a luxury-hotel worker in Mexico City. That 2018 movie is an essential gradualist watch, observing one maid (Gabriela Cartol) on her workaday drudge washing glossy guests’ fancy rooms.
I liked Chambermaid while wondering if it was a stunt. By never leaving the hotel, the film evoked the main character’s entrapment, reducing her outside world to poignant calls home to a never-seen child. Cartol’s performance captured the crush of a dystopian present, cut off from advancement options or non-transactional relationships. But that kind of chilliness can be a pose. So it’s a testament to Avilés’ talent that her follow-up is so raucous and warm.
If Chambermaid showed a slice of life, Tótem takes the whole cake. Seven-year-old Sol (Naíma Sentíes) arrives at the house where her extended family is throwing a birthday party for her father, Tona (Mateo García Elizondo). The stakes for this gathering are set early, when Sol tells her mother (Iazua Larios) her wish “for daddy not to die.” Tona’s knockdown sick with what seems to be an ancestral malady. His own mother died of cancer. His imperious father (Alberto Amado) needs an electronic voicebox to speak. Tina himself is in the pain-and-diaper phase of a fatal illness. This celebration is also, on some level, a living funeral.
Sol’s too young to grasp the situation. But she absorbs a lot. Tótem’s pre-party preparation is dominated by Sol’s aunts. Frustrated Nuri (Montserrat Marañon) tries to get everyone to speak honestly about Tona’s medical needs. Alejandra (Marisol Gasé) is dreamier, happily paying the extra 500 pesos for an especially intense spiritual cleansing. Completing this matriarchy is Cruz (Teresita Sánchez), Tona’s nurse, a near-mystical figure of calm who also hasn’t been paid in weeks.
Where Chambermaid was static, Tótem bounds restlessly around the home. And if “Dad Has Cancer” sounds like a brutal watch, know that Avilés merrily throws you into some primal event-planning tensions: Will the weather cooperate, Will the guest of honor ever arrive, Will you kids please help out a bit? A dizzying number of relatives and acquaintances start showing up, and it’s marvelous how quickly Avilés sketches so many multi-generational dynamics. The family layout is hyper-specific, faintly arty-intellectual, with complicated co- or single-parent situations among the different grown siblings. By the time the toasts start, you feel you’re among old friends.
Tótem grapples with heavy questions, and can stare into the void when you least expect it. It captures how magnified little moments become when a loved one approaches the end. This is a humane masterwork, as visceral as the present moment and as profound as a memory. Which also sums up its current streaming berth on the Criterion Channel, a safe space for classic cinema in the digital now.