OVERVIEW
When Elsa returns to Costa Rica after years abroad, she finds her sister Amalia somewhere between a spiritual crisis and a more ordinary kind of collapse. Their parents are no help: the father is distracted dating women her own age, the mother absorbed in republishing the erotic poems of her youth. Written and directed by Valentina Maurel, Siempre soy tu animal materno is a family portrait built around one unanswerable question: what does a person owe someone who does not want to be saved?
BACKGROUND
Costa Rica does not have a film industry in any conventional sense. Maurel has said as much herself, describing the making of I Have Electric Dreams as a collective learning process: the actors discovering performance, and her discovering how to direct them. That debut, shot in San José over two months in late 2021, won three prizes at Locarno and toured festivals for the better part of two years. Siempre soy tu animal materno is the follow-up, financed again through a Belgium-France-Mexico co-production, shot in the same city, with two of the same lead actors. It also marks Maurel’s return to Cannes proper, this time in Un Certain Regard, and it is the first Costa Rican feature ever included in the festival’s official selection.
THE REVIEW
It opens with Elsa jogging down her old street toward the house she grew up in, and despite not saying anything, we know exactly what is going through her head by the condescending way she looks at the graffiti on the walls. She spent years abroad building a self she considers an improvement on the one she left behind, and that superiority is something the film slowly, carefully breaks down.
The house is now inhabited by her younger sister, Amalia, who was left behind when Elsa moved and now lives with friends all the time, including a much older boyfriend. Amalia has changed the lock, which stopped the maid from coming, and Elsa finds the sink clogged and the house a mess. Both parents have long moved on to the separate projects of their own lives. The mother is pouring energy into Botox and relaunching old erotic poems she wrote years ago. The father has ditched the family for a rotating cast of younger girlfriends and cannot manage a practical gesture that would cost him nothing, like calling a plumber. Elsa sees Amalia as a project. She is there to fix her. The film shows that things are not quite like that.
What we come to understand is a family broken down by each other, each searching for happiness at the expense of the others, which brought them all, in different ways, to the same sadness.
Much of the film is dedicated to the dynamic among these four characters, and as it unfolds, it becomes clear that Amalia is not the only one who needs a maternal figure. Elsa may be in a more worrying place. Caught between the life she left and the one she went to find in Europe, quick to judge her sister and to use Amalia’s friends and old haunts for her own grounding, she is not quite ready to be the maternal figure she believes herself to be. What Maurel shows, patiently and without commentary, is that circumstances may have forced Elsa to mature in some areas, but not the ones that count.
FINAL THOUGHTS
A film that explores maturity at different stages of life and the consequences of living only for yourself, Forever Your Maternal Animal is raw and occasionally uneven, but ultimately rings true. Maurel draws empathetic performances from all four leads, and the family dynamic they build together feels lived-in and specific As someone who also left his home country in search of something better, and make my yearly trips back, I recognized more of that than I was comfortable with.