point of contact

DOSSIER 2006
The official online publication of the
Syracuse International Film Festival, Vol.3
A Point of Contact Production

Geminis - Argentina
Directed by Albertina Carri

Film Review by Julie Grossman

Geminis, by Argentinian filmmaker Albertina Carri, is a deeply compelling story about a middle-class family whose habits in relating to one another are radically destabilized by an incestuous affair begun by the teenaged son and daughter.

The film focuses on the dominating figure of Lucia, beautifully acted by Christina Banegas. The mother of three teen to adult-aged children, Jeremias (Lucas Escariz), Meme (Maria Abadi), and Ezequiel (Damian Ramonda), Lucia’s husband Daniel (Daniel Fanego) hardly speaks, which underscores Lucia’s dominance in the family. Indeed Lucia’s command seems to be at the center of the incest story, as is suggested in the scene in which daughter Meme and son Jere watch a documentary about pandas, the sullen Meme wondering whether the mother’s hugging of both her panda babies at once is a result of “culture” or “nature.” The question speaks possibly to the claustrophobia of family relations but also to unexplained causes, which becomes the frame of the narrative that unfolds.

The movie compares the family’s story to soap operas, which play on television in the background of several scenes, but the film also deconstructs the easy moral and psychological portraits portrayed in soap operas. “One’s bad, “Lucia’s maid Olga offers about two characters in a popular melodramatic soap opera; “the other’s good.” In the world of this family, such easy glossing on why people do the things they do does not obtain. Indeed, part of the movie’s fascination is its distance from the issue of motivation. We don’t exactly know why Meme and Jere begin their affair, but we recognize the emotionally traumatic denouement toward the end of the film.

The movie is satiric of empty middle-class values but also means to shear away the surface of domestic habits to show raw desires and emotions: pain, desire, and anger.
The slight anonymity in the tone draws us in to ask our own questions about how families function and why they often don’t.

The camera becomes another character in this dramatic story, as it pans and slowly tracks the setting and the characters. The camera often builds tension in the scene through its steady but menacing presence, making the film at certain points seem like a horror movie—which seems appropriate, given the film’s interest in emotional shock and a devastating revelation that destroys the powerful fantasies that often undergird family and social relations.