The Movie Teller (La Contadora de Películas, 2023), by Lone Scherfig
Did you know that April is Book Month? Many literary special dates are celebrated this month, such as International Children’s Book Day on April 2nd (that is Hans Christian Andersen’s birthday) and World Book Day on April 23rd (the day Shakespeare and Cervantes, among others, died). Literature has served as an inspiration for cinema since its beginnings, with Georges Méliès. And this tendency remains strong nowadays, with several adaptations of books to movies hitting the screens every year. If it is an engaging narrative that also deals with the love for cinema, better yet. This is the case with “The Movie Teller” (originally “La Contadora de Películas”).
Maria Margarita (Alondra Valenzuela) lives in a village near a saltpeter mine in the Atacama desert in Chile, in the year 1966. In her house also live her father, Medardo (Antonio de la Torre), her mother, Maria Magnólia (Bérénice Bejo), and her three brothers, whose names all start with M. The repeated M is the secret for success, according to Medardo: see for exemple Marilyn Monroe, who was a nobody when she signed Norma Jean. The inverse is also true, for instance, with Marion Michael Morison, better known as John Wayne.
When Medardo suffers a workplace accident and becomes paraplegic, the family life changes completely. The main change is that there won’t be enough money to send all children to the movies on Sunday. A contest is then proposed: each Sunday, one of the children goes to the movies and, once at home, tells the family the movie’s plot. The one who tells it better wins the right to be the official movie teller.
Of course the winner is Maria Margarita, who becomes the official movie teller not only for her family, but for all the village. She starts attracting crowds every Sunday evening, and the family starts selling tickets to the people who want to listen to her. Years go by and she (now played by Sara Becker) keeps her position, even though life becomes more difficult. Cinema changes her destiny.
This is truly an international film. Bérénice Bejo was born in Argentina, but made her name in France, and was nominated for an Oscar for Best Supporting Actress for “The Artist” (2011). Daniel Brühl, who plays the manager of the mine, is German and speaks many languages, but his father was born in Brazil. The screenplay was written by the Spanish duo Rafa Ruso and Isabel Coixet, together with the Brazilian filmmaker Walter Salles, who was already a huge fan of the book by Hernán Rivera Letelier.
Director Lone Scherfig is Danish, and left her mark in the very start of her career with a film made under the rules of Dogma 95, “Italian for Beginners”, that won the Jury Prize at the Berlin Film Festival in 2001. In 2009, she directed one of her best known movies, “An Education”, for which Carey Mulligan was nominated for an Oscar.
Obviously, there were made changes from the book to the movie. The main one is that Maria Magnólia becomes almost the lead in the movie, while in the book she is nothing but a spectrum, a remembrance, a person whose name and presence are not worth remembering. The other changes in the screenplay were made to make the movie less tragic and more hopeful.
A nice game to play while watching the movie is to try to recognize the films that are watched by the lead at the movies, although sometimes the fun is interrupted by the citation of the title — then it’s nice to check which ones you already watched. However, a review on Letterboxd says that the real experience of going to the movies in a pueblo wasn’t portrayed, because it was a chaotic experience and the films exhibited were often the so-called “B movies”.
Starting the story in 1966, one obvious thing was that the plot would arrive in 1973, when there was a military coup in Chile with the murder of president Salvador Allende and the rise to power of Augusto Pinochet. Less than a spoiler, the revelation of the results of the coup in “The Movie Teller” is a big truth: it killed not only dreams, but also the biggest dream factory in the world, because the movie theater in Maria Margarita’s pueblo was closed.
Movies about movies have always existed, and metalanguage is still near and dear to filmmakers. Not so acid now like it was in the past — there were in the 1950s many critics to the movie world, for instance with “Sunset Boulevard” (1950) and “The Bad and the Beautiful” (1952). Today the cinema about cinema is made more of compliments than criticism, and we can mention a very recent example in Arnaud Desplechin’s “Filmlovers!”. Categorized as “love letters to the movies”, it’s great that those films are still being made constantly, so we never lose sight of the magic there is in movies.
