J Paul Johnson
Malta, the second feature by Colombian writer-director Natalia Santa, is a mesmerizing slow burn of a character study, an up-ever-so-close-and-discomfortingly-personal portrait of its teenage protagonist, a young woman from Bogotá who dreams of escaping her suffocating reality to travel the world, one she knows only from Google Maps. By day she sludges through the doldrums of work, by night a series of one-night stands, and all along she imagines one day she might salt away just enough savings to travel to the Mediterranean island-nation that gives the film its name.
It’s not a pretty picture by any means. Malta, in contrast to the sun-dappled coasts of the imagined destination of its title, is intentionally drab, a neo-Neorealist slice-of-life in busy Bogotá, where young Mariana (Estefanía Piñeres) works by day at multiple jobs. She staffs the desk at a low-rent motel and takes shifts at a customer-service call center. Neither job offers any tangible purpose nor future, save for a few thousand pesos to be squirreled away, ideally to move out of her mother’s house, where she resides but doesn’t really live and where she no longer feels welcome.
Mariana spends her free time on the streets, in the clubs, and with a variety of men, both random hookups and a couple of more-occasional “benefits”-based friendships. Her lack of affect—Mariana drifts through these encounters with the same listless lack of energy she brings to her tedious day jobs—suggests that what she’s looking for isn’t really the sex or the companionship but some brief moments of escape from a life that only occasionally feels worth the effort.
Santa’s stylistic choices here are to keep the camera focused exclusively on Piñeres’ Mariana with a handheld camera, naturalistic lighting, and unobtrusive editing. The character talks little: in many scenes she is alone, but even in interaction with others she’s reticent, warily sizing up others with her closed body language, steely gaze, and clenched jaw. Another filmmaker might have tried a different tack with a clunky expository device like a talk-to character or voice-over narration. Malta is all the better for Santa’s more verité approach, even if its protagonist remains at a distance for much of the narrative’s duration.
Mariana is, after all, going it alone. Hers is a journey towards an uncertain adulthood largely without traditional female companionship, a supportive family, traditional romantic relationships, or, for that matter, even much of a potential future in terms of life, career, or love. None of what happens in Malta advances its protagonist towards any particular goal or fulfills any stated quest: Mariana simply drifts, from one shift, one gig, one guy, one day, to the next, dreaming only to be somewhere else than where she is today.
It’s an approach a little like what that of what might by considered its companion film, last year’s Un Varón (A Male), which was Colombia’s official nomination for the Oscars’ Best International Feature category. Where Malta focuses on its young protagonist’s exploration of femininity and sexuality, director-writer Fabián Hernández’s Un Varón takes on its topic of toxic masculinity with a similar low-key, slow-cinema approach. One can almost imagine the protagonist of Un Varón, Carlos, passing by Malta’s Mariana in the dark of night on the streets of Bogotá, so similar are their films’ settings, styles, and themes.
None of that is to suggest that Malta is at all derivative. Both films feel equally fresh and welcome. Unlike Un Varón’s Carlos, whose fate seems practically predetermined, Malta‘s Mariana does, eventually, strike up an unlikely friendship. Gabriel (Emmanuel Restrepo), an awkward classmate whose clumsy attempts at conversation finally succeed with Mariana, surprisingly breaks through her stony façade and compels her to confront both her relationship with her family and the underlying reasons behind her desire to escape.
Theirs is hardly a romance for the ages, but Gabriel and Mariana’s awkward friendship-with-awkward benefits feels genuine and, for whatever slight duration it is likely to last, meaningful. Even while Mariana strives to keep her life strictly compartmentalized, Gabriel’s presence starts breaking down barriers. Don’t expect, from this slice-of-life film, grand gestures, surprise reveals, big pronouncements, or out-of-the-blue decisions. Malta, debuting at this year’s SXSW Film Festival, is smarter than that and aims instead to present a complex female character on the precipice of adulthood, desperately and not all that successfully trying to imagine a life for herself where no real possibilities seem to exist. It’s to the film’s and to director-writer Santa’s credit that it restrains itself from presenting a solution where none, really, seem to exist.
