By Susan Thea Posnock
Early on in Maldeamores (Lovesickness) I realized I wasn’t watching a conventional take on romance. In place of bright-eyed, beautiful protagonists who have a “meet cute” and then pretend to hate each other for an hour, the film—which is the official Oscar foreign language entry for Puerto Rico—features stalkers, adulterers and most compelling and surprising of all, old folks.
It was written by Carlitos Ruiz Ruiz and Jorge Gonzales. Ruiz co-directed with his wife, Mariem Perez Riera and his brother Luillo Ruiz is the producer. It features an ensemble led by Luis Guzman, who plays a cheating husband, a part that was written for him. Actor Benicio Del Toro served as an executive producer and it was one of the first independent films to receive funding from the Puerto Rico Film Commission’s new incentive law.
This isn’t a Sleepless in Seattle version of “love in a movie,” but a messy, heightened mixture of love, sex, and hate—blended together with a strong dose of humor. It shows how the onset of these emotions can afflict people of all ages, but it was the septuagenarian love triangle I found most intriguing.
The introduction of two of these elderly performers, shown slurping soup in a loud duet amidst a series of close-ups, initially grossed me out. But as the story develops between Flora (Silvia Brito), Cirilo (Chavito Marrero) and interloper Pellin (Miguel Angel Alvarez) my squeamishness evolved into enchanted amusement. Flora and Cirilo are a divorced couple that have been living together for nearly 30 years. The rhythm of their soup slurping is suddenly interrupted when Pellin, Flora’s first husband, returns to live out his final years with his love from long ago. This may not be the pretty portrayal of romance I’m used to, but it felt lived in and authentic, if not “realistic.” The actors—Brito in particular—are wonderful.
“Silvia Brito the 80-year-old actress that plays Flora is a charm and a woman with such a character that by the end of the story you look at her as a sexy mama,” says Ruiz, who answered a series of questions I sent to him and actor Guzman via email.
He says the response to the older triangle has been uniformly positive and it was a plotline he felt was essential in giving a fully rounded view of love in all its irrational glory. “We know that generally love and sex among older people are not included in films and that’s why we wanted so badly to make the audience watch a love triangle between old people,” he says. “We wanted to show love in every stage of life—childhood, adulthood, elderly. We felt that sometimes in the elderly stage of life love is mistaken with compassion and the fear of being alone, but there is only the need of a spark to start a fire. So it was important for us to show how our grandmothers never lose passion and the need to feel.”
It’s an interesting idea, but the possibility of it makes me feel slightly confounded. It would be just a little comforting to think that lovesickness is something that we get too wise to fall for in our golden years. Not likely.
Ruiz says the material came out of his obsession with the “absurd idea of perfect love” that’s seen in the majority of films. “When I met Mariem Perez, my partner in crime, we decided to make a film showing the real face of love as the egoist, obsessive and masochistic feeling that moves this world,” he explains. “The stories in the film are very close to us because they come from real events of our friends and our families.”
Rather than perfectionism, Maldeamores shows the perverse side of love, with what Ruiz calls flawed characters and absurdist situations. He says he and Perez frame these with dark humor and cynicism.
One of those flawed characters is Ismael, a man who cheats on his wife with her cousin, brought to comic life by Guzman.
“Ismael’s are all over the place,” the actor says. “How many guys have cheated on their wives with other family members…I put myself in that position and went for it…”
Guzman says Puerto Rico has great storytellers with a lust for passion. “Whether it’s through comedy or drama, we have an incredible pool of talent,” he says. It was the effectiveness of the screenplay that attracted him to the project. “I really dug the three story lines and how they paralleled life and its realities. It was funny, smart, witty and clever,” he says.
The actor—perhaps best known for his work with Steven Soderbergh and Paul Thomas Anderson—grew up in Puerto Rico, so the fact that the film was shot there was also a big plus. “I showed up a week before shooting and played a lot of dominoes, downed a few pina coladas and I was good to go,” he says.
The popularity of Latin American films in general and the film commission’s new incentive law for filmmakers are helping to turn Puerto Rico into an island movie paradise. Prior to the incentive law, Ruiz says there really wasn’t a film industry. “It was really hard for young filmmakers like us to even dream about making films in Puerto Rico,” he says.
In the past, he says a movie would get made once every six years. Last year eight films were produced because of the fund, with 80 percent of financing coming from the government. “Because of its small size [Puerto Rico] constantly emanates a feeling of confinement and claustrophobia,” he notes. “This gives us the perfect setting to explore, throughout the film, the traumas and foibles of our collective madness.”
While a perfect setting to film Maldeamores some believed that pressure and confined space would challenge the marriage of Ruiz and Perez—who had fallen in love after they returned from studying filmmaking abroad, in Chicago and Cuba respectively.
“People were concerned if our relationship would last through the film. You know it is intense to work for two years with your partner in a film about bad love,” he says. “But it was a piece of cake for us. We share the same sensibility and taste for storytelling. We were in love with the characters and the stories and we felt privileged to be able to work every day in something we loved so much,” he says.
He says their next project—they’ve signed as directors with Creative Artists Agency (CAA) and have been reading scripts—will likely be a dark comedy shot in English. They are also working on a new screenplay that deals with youth in Puerto Rico.
He says Del Toro, who recently filmed The Argentine with Soderbergh in Puerto Rico, has called movies the next national sport for the island. It’s a sentiment shared by Ruiz.
“There is a new breed of young filmmakers that are competing to put their voice out there,” he says. “This is the starting point of the developing of an industry that is growing fast and steady.”
*This article first appeared on Awards Daily.
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