Official Selection: Competition - review - LA TIRISIA (Perpetual Sorrow) by Jorge Pérez Solano

There’s no escape from everyday perpetual sorrow for the characters in Jorge Pérez Solano’s film La Tirisia, which had its international premiere at the 49^th edition of the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival.

In a deserted setting that seems abandoned by nature and the whole world, people struggle to save their lives from the desolation of ignorance and monotony. Nevertheless, whatever quiet character we meet already seems to act nothing short of zombie life, fully assimilated by the drag of everyday life.

La Tirisia mainly follows the lives of a group of people, and the central character is a woman named Cheba, whose husband left her for a decent wage in the North. Seeing this as a betrayal, she has become pregnant with the child of another man, and upon her husband’s return, finds herself in big trouble of a backlash.

This film is somewhat of a follow up from director’s first feature debut that took a look at these husbands’ migration for work that destroyed the stability of their familial entity. Here, the personalities of the sexes seem to blend in inhumane ways in favour of a lack of sentimentality, compassion or warmth and hence a treasuring of the idealism of machismo. Similarly, the vulnerability of the children who live without an assurance of proper and protected upbringing from their own parents, can seem particularly haunting.

The aforementioned setting is vital to the atmospheric intensity of the piece and a metaphorical representation of survival instinct within its vegetation. Life must carry on under scorching sun and lack of escapism. All the while, the titular element of perpetual sorrow is cinematically reproduced through a realistic documentarian approach but also a slow pace and lacking loquaciousness.