Audio By Carbonatix
Beginning with its title — the indeterminate-sounding At Midnight and a Half — Marite Ugas and Mariana Rondon’s film cultivates a preoccupation with suspended states (a preoccupation suggested even more forcefully by the curiously circular syntax of the Spanish title, A La Media Noche y Media). Alienated lovers, lost children, and the generally dispossessed inhabit an isolated world that most resembles a secular limbo, a holding cell for the brokenhearted.
As the film opens, tidal waves threaten a seaside community. Sebastian (Salvador del Solar) drives an old Ford Futura along the coastal highway, his radio blasting a Latin pop tune that is equal parts salsa, Beach Boys, and Rolling Stones. More concerned with the increasingly angry sea at his side than with the road, he inadvertently strikes and kills a young girl’s dog. The child, separated from her parents, will become Sebastian’s constant companion even as he attempts to leave her and the city behind. His efforts at escape (first by land, then by sea) grow more desperate but do not appear to be motivated by the impending arrival of the waves that portend, in the child’s words, the end of the world. Sebastian’s world, we learn, already has suffered a symbolic death: the dissolution of his relationship with Ana, the sensual woman he repeatedly encounters — but does not approach — on the town’s now nearly deserted streets. (The coming storm has forced most of the residents to the edge of town, where they sit in their cars, waiting to leave.)
Ana, who wanders the abandoned city taking pictures of buildings for a scale model she is assembling, is obsessed with memory, forgetfulness, and the sweet oblivion she associates with love and death. She furtively photographs a young couple making love in the foyer of an apartment building and is transported by the voyeuristic thrill. Finding herself in the center of an impromptu street festival (the defiant townspeople’s open challenge to the sea), she moves her body suggestively to the music and quickly attracts an admirer, whom she dismisses just as quickly (“No thank you…. I don’t want to know you.”). Not surprisingly she is drawn to a news story about a man whose murder-suicide pact with his lover was interrupted by police, and who is now unjustly described only as the woman’s killer. (Owing to the incongruities of subtitling, non-Spanish-speaking viewers will be deprived of the significant, but fading, last line of the newscast that explains the two lovers would often meet in public places and pretend to be strangers.)
Ana and Sebastian perform an endless dance through the streets of the deteriorating colonial city. They alternately elude and chase, if not each other, their recollections of the past, while the future hangs frozen in the air (in perpetual disequilibrium, as Sebastian’s young friend might put it). The film, like the sea that endlessly churns without producing the anticipated surge, ultimately revels in its own irresolution.
At Midnight and a Half, which is beautifully photographed by Micaela Cajahuaringa Schreiber in cool blues, hot yellows, and orange, is a tropicolor, Latin-American Last Year at Marienbad, a sometimes luscious but not altogether satisfying meditation on love, loss, and memory.
