Utama

A simple story of aging and reconciliation between an elderly Quechua-speaking married couple and their grandson where they reside in their Altiplano Basin community that is within the Andes in Bolivia and Peru, Utama is a vivid slice-of-life film about the struggles of South American lifestyles. The debut feature by Alejandro Loayza Grisi, which was awarded the World Cinema Grand Jury Prize at Sundance back in January, has delivered a visually poetic and elegiac film that satisfies with its human drama and a visual style that is more luminous than stripped-down. With the film’s affecting characterizations merged with a deep human spirit, Utama is an inviting and naturalistic portrait about family bonding, life’s struggles, and the passage of time.

Also serving as screenwriter, Grisi’s original screenplay comes to life with a formal visual style inspired by Grisis’ conceptualization that is brought to life by cinematographer Barbara Alvarez that uses a lot of landscape cinematography and beautifully framed shots of vistas, sunsets, sundown’s, clouds, and mountains that help give the film a docu-style feel that never resorts to hand-held or jittery camerawork to immerse the story’s rich setting. The film is shot mostly on location, with a few scenes inside. It’s a mostly remote area, 12,000 feet above sea level, where the area has been scarred by Spanish conquest, and doesn’t have much commerce or prosperity. The community mostly farms in drought conditions, and families must drive far out into the city of La Paz for healthcare, medicine, and food.

The film stars nonprofessional actors, and even the couple, Jose Calcina and Luisa Quispe, are an actual couple. In the film, they play a married couple named Virginio and Sisa who live in a mud hut that doesn’t have any form of electrical power or utilities. They both have their fair share of chores—for Virginio, he is responsible for taking care of the animals and the llamas. Sisa’s responsibility is to get the water to the nearby town, but the community faces obstacles once the well runs dry from the ongoing drought. Even the nearby river appears to be evaporating away due to the heat wave and drought.

Meanwhile, Virginio has developed ongoing coughing fits, in which he keeps his illness away from Sisa. The cough continues to worsen by the day, and the drought continues to get worse—even the llamas faint due to dehydration and heat exhaustion. Virginio is well into his 80s, he doesn’t want to get treated in the city, but much prefers to just die at home if it comes to that. Sisa and Virginio eventually get a surprise visit from their grandson, Clever (Santos Choque). He notices his grandfather’s cough and urges him to go to the doctor’s office to get it checked out. Virginio even resists the plight of Sisa and Clever, not just out of stubbornness, but almost out of spiritual necessity.

This is where Grisis’s themes of nature play out. Another day of suffering without rain feels like purgatory, and it’s just another day of Mother Nature overpowering humankind. Even if the community is sacrificing their own animals to a local deity who claims to hold power from the rain gods that can control weather patterns, everything seems casual. It’s here where the vistas and nature feel like the main characters in the films due to how explicit they are in the frame. The horizons are always in frame, the blue skies fade in and out, and humans look like they are in ravishing oil paintings as they resort to silhouettes as the sun goes down. The interior shots are affecting, especially the shots of Sisa and Virginio having dinner or drinking together inside the hut.

Thematically rich, Utama ends up delivering some illuminating ideas about generational differences and perceptions of the natural world. For Virginio, he has lived within the natural world throughout his life. Clever, who is from the city and is often on his phone, is completely detached from the natural world. Their disagreements intersect with an examination of the generational gap between the two. Clever wants his grandfather to retreat to the modern world, in which Virginio doesn’t want to inevitably die being confined to a hospital room with strangers, and around machines. There is complete empathy to be found within both perspectives as Sisa urges Virginio to get a doctor.

With a running time of only 87 minutes, Utama does have some deliberate pacing and slow passages. However, as the film’s pacing picks up as it progresses with its dramatic momentum, there is a lot of visual grandeur on display here, and the human drama works its way to an affecting payoff that is undeniably moving. In the end, the narrative unfolds with such naturalism and delicate drama, that it echoes the scope of an Ozu family drama. Seek it out, it’s the right antidote to all the awards season movies being released right now.