Sobre las nubes (About the Clouds), the portrait of a city and a contemporary saga of a middle class viewed through its relationship with work, depicts the everyday lives of four people with an artistry that’s abundant yet sober, generous yet precise. The dramatisation, stripped of any effects, is entirely devoted to the attention it pays to the characters. Ramiro, Nora, Hernán and Lucía don’t know each other. The only thing they have in common is that they work or are looking for work, and they live in the same city. They never meet, but all of them cross paths with the young woman with aquiline features, a musical presence who discreetly harmonises the film, accompanying it with her gentle melodies. María Aparicio, observing in the background, leaves these solitary presences to develop in parallel. Without ever raising its voice, the film unfolds with restraint and moderation, focusing on humility. When, in the dead of night, a female police officer asks a cross-dressing singer to go and sing elsewhere as he lip-synchs Maria Callas’ rendition of Tacea la notte placida (How Peaceful was the Night), all the sadness of a world reduced to silence is encapsulated in a sequence of rare beauty. In this melancholic black and white painting, the poetics of the image elevate the everyday to the unusual, the gloom to sweet fantasy, in discrete epiphanies like those magic tricks performed with mischief or the savvy pleasure taken in reciting a theatrical script. “I was sad, but I’m better” says one of the characters at the end of the film. Just as the clouds over the city come and go, caught up in the infinite movement of time, the characters’ sadness eventually subsides and seems to disappear to “that place that no one has ever visited, that place we call the past”, in the words of Juan José Saer (Las Nubes).
(Louise Martin Papasian)María Aparicio