Mexican director Fernando Eimbcke is a delight, a playful formalist in a sea of self-serious festival auteurs. But because comedy is often viewed askance by the Powers That Be in world cinema, Eimbcke is frequently overlooked in favor of more serious filmmakers. He could be compared to Argentina’s Martín Rejtman, perhaps, although Rejtman’s films are much drier than Eimbcke’s, which are also a bit more openly sentimental. There’s a roughness, a handcrafted quality, to Eimbcke’s films, like Wes Anderson in comfortable shoes.
But his fourth feature Olmo may gain a bit more traction than his last three, Duck Season (2004), Lake Tahoe (2008), and Club Sandwich (2013). This one has backing from Teorema, the production house of current Mexican cinema poster boy Michel Franco, and Brad Pitt gets an executive producer credit. It’s also set in New Mexico and is about half in English. If Eimbcke has a big break coming to him, Olmo is very likely the film that’ll do it. It’s a wry family comedy centered on 13-year-old Olmo (Aivan Uttapa), who we first meet jerking off in his bedroom. This rosy-palmed reverie is interrupted by his father (Gustavo Sánchez Parra) calling to him from the next room. This, in a nutshell, is the central crisis at the heart of the film.
Olmo’s dad Nestor is infirm. He needs constant care, because he cannot walk, sit up, eat, or go to the bathroom by himself. (Near the end of the film, we learn that Nestor suffers from multiple sclerosis.) Olmo’s mom (Andrea Suarez Paz) is unexpectedly called into work, and older sister Ana (Rosa Armendariz) has plans at the skating rink. So Olmo is forced to stay home and care for Dad, even though he and his friend Miguel (Diego Olmedo) want to go to a party with Nina (Melanie Frometa), the hot girl across the street. (Olmo was imagining her washing the car in a bikini while pleasuring himself. This is serious.)
It’s 1979. Phones have long curly cords. Stereos have turntables and cassette decks. TVs have rabbit ears. There’s disco. And Olmo abides by the genre rules of the classic late ‘70s/early ‘80s coming-of-age film. Of course, Olmo and Miguel break the rules and leave Dad alone to go try and score. Much of what Eimbcke has to offer you’ve seen before, although perhaps with less symmetry or precision. But there’s a melancholy undercurrent here that suggests that Olmo is as much a story of Nestor facing his own mortality as it is Olmo trying to become a man.
Olmo’s story is indeed the focal point of the film, but it’s also very much about Nestor and how his family copes (or doesn’t) with his illness. His wife, we discover, takes as much work as possible, not just because they need the money, but also to get out of the house. Ana openly defies Nestor by smoking in the house. And when Olmo spills soup in Nestor’s shirt and is trying to help him change, he gets frustrated and asks, “what difference does it make? Why do you bother to get dressed at all?” It’s easy to find all of this very affecting, and not just if, like this writer, it mirrors one’s own family experience with helping a handicapped member. Eimbcke and Sánchez clearly display the loneliness and wounded pride of a man who, through no fault of his own, cannot care for himself. He just wants his place in the family he helped create, and continually finds himself sidelined.
Near the conclusion of Olmo, Eimbcke borrows a technique from Ramon Zürcher, providing a kind of recap of the film’s narrative by providing still shots of props and objects that have appeared throughout the film: a wet mattress, a junk car, the old stereo, etc. This formal tactic helps mitigate the overt sentiment that holds the film together, reminding us that there is an objective world that all of us are constantly trying to navigate. Olmo is young, and cannot yet help seeing others as objects: Nina being a sexual goal and Nestor an impediment to that goal. By focusing our attention on actual things, Olmo helps us see the kid’s partial exit from youth’s essential egocentrism, as he learns what it means to show up for others.
Published as part of TIFF 2025 — Dispatch 2.
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