6 – MIRANDA, FROM FRIDAY TO MONDAY
(Argentina/2024)
Direction and script: María Victoria Menis
Duration: 86 minutes
Performers: Inés Estévez, Ricardo Merkin, Elvira Oneto, Luciana Grasso, Laura Grandinetti and Diego de Paula
Premiere in theaters
Not all transformations are the same. Some manifest themselves clearly to the outside and others only run along internal cableways. There are those that have a defined starting point and those that are the result of extensive decantation. Some bloom to mark the beginning of a more fortunate stage; others, to close one with several unpleasant experiences. The one Miranda goes through has a little bit of everything. The protagonist of the director’s return to fiction feature films Maria Victoria Menis (The little heaven, The camera obscura, Mary and the Spider) after an excursion through the documentary (My story in the cinema) is 48 years old and is Literature teacher at a school whose educational routine explodes following a student’s report of abuse. No minor detail: the year is 2016 and the green wave It’s just starting to gain strength.
The date is key to understanding Miranda’s attitude towards this situation and the subsequent movements of her emotional variables. That is why she responds to the silence of the authorities by doing what her colleagues do not, that is, openly supporting the young woman, which leads to her going home surrounded by applause from the students. From that opening, Miranda, from Friday to Monday It will encapsulate your experiences during the time period of the title. A couple of days like so many others, if not because they will be lavish in changes “without spectacularity, but with substance”, as the actress precisely defined. Ines Estevez before journalist Oscar Ranzni during the interview published in these pages on Sunday.
While he receives calls from his colleagues recommending that he wear flip-flops to protect his work, he puts his chest to a very particular family dynamic. He has two teenage daughters, one with maturation problems (very fair Luciana Grasso) and another (Laura Grandinetti) ready to spread her wings and start her adult life, an Italian father with dementia (Ricardo Merkin at times in plan comic relief) who lives in a nursing home and takes her home for a few days, and a mother (Elvira Oneto) who taught her to smoke at the age of ten so that she “wouldn’t have to smoke alone.” She joins a boyfriend who is fascinated with Villa Gesell – a place she hates – of whom we will only know her voice on the phone and her ex and father of the daughters (Diego de Paula) with whom she gets along very well. They get along so well that the boy returns to the fray to try to rebuild the romance. Miranda, like almost all women, is a daughter, mother, worker and girlfriend at the same time.
As if that were not enough, Miranda wants to sing again, a passion that she left for reasons that are not specified, but that were most likely linked to her motherhood. It is not unreasonable to read in that situation – a pending matter that the film illustrates by appealing to magical realism – the germ of her attitude at school. Everything happens to Miranda, inside and out. Of the first, Estévez gives small hints, because her performance is of a contained style, implosive rather than explosive. The second is up to Menis, who films her with devotion, but without suffocating her by hitting her with the camera or bombarding her with close-ups. Theirs is rather an intimate and modest observational behavior, at a fair distance. Good way to make visible an earthquake that is impossible to capture with a seismograph.
