2023-10-11 11:30:56
Carlos Lechuga calmly follows the path of a Cuban clairvoyant.
It’s a strange ritual, half familiar, half exotic: tarot cards that one hand handles with safety and firmness, but also a glass of water filled with shells, scaled Madonnas, wooden necklaces. A voice that begins a clairvoyance session. Vicenta comes to us like this, first through his voice and his hands, in the placid environment of a large, beautiful and dilapidated house, such as only exists in Cuba. In Havana, the medium lives alone with her older mixed-race son (she is Afro-Cuban, the father of Hispanic origin) who is preparing to leave for abroad. Following his departure, Vicenta begins to lose his footing and his powers of divination. On this kind of subject, mixing fantasy and depression, we are always wary of maximalist approaches, of dramatic crescendo with great reinforcement of visions and tantrums. Nothing of the sort in Vicenta B., which preserves from start to finish a curious calm, readable as much in these landscape shots – Havana is filmed as a series of hollows of nature rather than as an urban setting – as on the face of its main actress, the impassive Linnett Hernández Valdés.
The mystery of Vicenta’s journey takes time to resolve, as she initially seems to accept her fate, that of a 45-year-old woman who suddenly finds herself single and unsuited to life as it goes. Vicenta crosses the spaces and welcomes the signs of a coming storm – three times nothing, a chair which overturns under the effect of a gust, a ghost which appears without disturbing the daily life of the house. One day, however, a young girl knocks on his door, in the grip of a crisis of despair. Unable to help her, Vicenta, who no longer knows how to read the future since she misses her son, lets her go. We learned a few days later that she was in a coma following an attempted immolation. Vicenta then begins a journey of introspection which leads her from the young girl’s home, where she helps the grandfather, a false paralyzed person who comes to life mischievously at night, to a visit to her old aunt, each of the steps leading her to get closer to a community of women who understand her. With its precise attention to each gesture of care, the film affirms the belief that you only need to look for a long time for the magic to happen.
Vicenta B. by Carlos Lechuga, with Linnett Hernandez Valdes, Mireya Chapman, Aimée Despagne, 1h45.
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