Tremors
(Jayro Bustamante)
Jayro Bustamante’s Tremors details the excruciating emotional compromises needed to eek out a living for those that follow their heart. Pablo (Juan Pablo Olyslager), a recently outed husband and father of two, is first seen inconsolable, finding solace in his Evangelical family. They’re devastated by the news of the breakup, hoping to circumvent the separation and in denial over Pablo’s sexuality. Believing that their son can be “cured” of his homosexuality, as if to blot away a stain, the family and his wife Isa (Diane Bathen) seek conversion therapy within their Guatemalan Evangelical church.
Bustamante’s second film (his third, La Llorona, is also playing at the festival), Tremors operates within a largely unfussy, visually naked mode of filmmaking. He achieves gravitas through subtle gestures, rendering some incredibly potent moments out of stillness (a sequence where Pablo listens to messages from his children while in the arms of his lover is exceedingly powerful). He’s indebted to Claire Denis in deriving a measure of sensuality through physicality, with a wrestling scene late in the film reminiscent of certain passages from Denis’ Beau travail. There’s a compromise in tone here, where Bustamante’s reflexes veer from the lyrical to the melodramatic that may initially feel a bit frustrating. But this serves to reflect on some of the thematic gestures of Tremors itself – a film inherently about compromises, facades, and hiding our primordial nature. Concealed beneath the surface is a lyricism that can swell with truth, ultimately leaving Pablo to choose between a life of comfort in a lie or agony with the truth. The answer, as obvious as it may seem to some, is considerably more complicated.