The very best instances of allegory are those that allow themselves to be completely ignored. Too often, an artist only pretends to be interested in the specificity and minutiae of their story, because their eyes are set on the much bigger picture. Forever Your Maternal Animal, the second feature film from Costa Rican director Valentina Maurel, is first and foremost a portrait of a family in crisis, and a reminder that those fortunate enough to extricate themselves from the family nest do not always recognize what they find upon returning. At the same time, if one were so inclined, it is possible to read Maurel’s film as a forensic analysis on one generation abandoning the next, and the deleterious ideologies that are ready and waiting to fill that vacuum.
Maternal Animal is primarily told from the point of view of Elsa (Daniela Marín Navarro, who also starred in Maurel’s debut feature I Have Electric Dreams). She has returned to visit her parents and sister in the Zapote neighborhood of Costa Rica’s capital city San José. Elsa has been living and studying in Belgium for years, and she is committed to academia, as is her long-term partner, an anthropologist named Sven. Returning to her family home, she immediately discovers that her key no longer works. This is both situational and symbolic, as she finds that her 20-year-old younger sister Amalia (Mariangel Villeags) is the only family member left in the house. Their mother Isabel (Marina de Tavira) has gotten her own apartment and appears to be intent on recapturing her youth, in more ways than one. She has recently gotten plastic surgery (the bruises around her eyes are still quite visible), and is very involved with the republication of a collection of erotic poems that she published in her late teens. “I spent decades being your mother,” Isabel scolds Elsa, “and now it’s time for me.”
Elsa finds that Amalia has dropped out of school, is living in filth, and has opened the family home to a group of older men Elsa refers to as “losers.” This includes Amalia’s much older boyfriend Durán, who has taken over large portions of the house for his fledgling dog-breeding business. (Another of Amalia’s hangers-on is called “Creepy,” apparently even by his own mother.) Like a combination of your average frat house with Penelope’s suitor-infested residence in The Odyssey, Elsa’s childhood home is in complete disrepair, and one outer wall has been tagged with graffiti that reads “PUTA,” a label the cleaning woman tries to erase but that keeps coming back through the paint like an old wound.
Elsa’s father Nahuel (Reinaldo Amien Gutiérrez) is also on the scene, but peripherally. As Isabel quite fairly remarks, nothing much is expected of him since he extricated himself from the family years ago. Inasmuch as he tries to parent Elsa and Amalia, it is as an easy-going half-presence, more concerned with introducing his daughters to his young new girlfriend than in addressing the issues at hand. Maurel keeps us aligned with Elsa’s disturbed, rather judgmental point of view, as she sees herself as the only person willing to face her family’s dysfunction head-on.
But as Maurel shows, Elsa’s perception of herself as the healthy, rational one may involve a bit of self-deception. Since arriving back in San José, she has engaged in casual hookups with several old acquaintances, all while ignoring Sven’s phone calls. One repeated motif in Maternal Animal involves Elsa trying and failing to achieve orgasm, alone or with a partner. “Sorry, I lost the image,” she tells the first man, indicating that in order to cum, she has to envision herself somewhere other than where she actually is. This is perhaps the flipside of Elsa’s sense of detachment from her family: on some level she thinks that living at a distance permits her to see them more clearly, but it also reflects a desire to see herself as somehow above the interpersonal dynamics that made her who she is in the first place.
As we see, Amalia is pained by her mother’s abandonment, and it appears to be a kind of traumatic repetition of her father having left the family. Amalia is a complicated, at times deeply unlikeable character, and although she is rendered with careful specificity, it is possible to read her as a troubling sign of the times. She is developing her own personality, as young adults do, but with little input from her family. That role is being filled not only by the older men in her orbit, but also, it seems, the Internet and various fringe beliefs. Amalia is convinced not only that she is visited by ghosts in her dreams, but that she is frequently raped by spirits in the night. She has become obsessed with Illuminati-based conspiracy theories, and is convinced that anyone she meets who contradicts her views is a pedophile or a quack.
In other words, Amalia has fallen down a rabbit hole not unlike those that give us MAGA, spiritual esoterica, alternative medicine scams, and all those other examples of “doing your own research.” Elsa tries unconvincingly to hide her skepticism and disgust, but as Maurel shows, these are the results of the narcissistic cult of the self, wherein everyone simply surrounds themselves with those people and ideas that tell them they are okay. The twist in all this is that Elsa, “the rational one,” is forced to take a step back and ask herself whether she may be doing the same thing, only in a different flavor. Forever Your Maternal Animal doesn’t treat all ideologies as equal, but it does remind us that losing oneself to irrational, self-confirming ideologies begins with the belief that you really do have all the answers, and that everything would be fine if people just did what you thought they should.
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