Cinema: “La Veronica”, by Chilean Leonardo Medel, everything “for the show”

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On screens from this Wednesday, August 17, The Veronica, a film by Chilean director Leonardo Medel, discovered at the San Sebastian festival in 2020, and representative of the vitality of Chilean cinema. Beyond the bright colors of its swimming pool and the charming smile of La Veronica hides a funny and cruel criticism, also fierce of social networks and certain media, of their emptiness and ultimately of their dangerousness because of their power of manipulation. .

What is hiding behind this face? This question haunts the viewer for 3/4 of the film. She is also the selling point of an authorized biography of influencer Veronica Lara, wife of a multi-millionaire Chilean football star. Veronica Lara’s face is always, throughout the film, on all planes, from the front and in the middle of the screen. The other characters, except for the young girls whom she trains for the “profession” of social network stars, appear in profile, from behind, in the background.

La Veronica and her two disciples, by the pool. A film by Leonardo Medel which features a sort of Chilean Victoria Beckham. © Moolight Films

A multi-layered story

Veronica’s life is played out on the screens, her blog, her Instagram account, her various profiles on the networks. Veronica speaks to the camera all the time, which has the effect of blurring the line between the virtual world and her life. When does the representation end and when is it “true”? It is all the more difficult to answer that, like a mille-feuille, the scenario multiplies the levels of narration: with his biographer, with the prosecutor, with his mother, with his stepmother, etc. What is sincere if not true in these stories? To the housekeeper who asks her why she speaks to her mother-in-law – these are the “confession” sequences, Veronica answers: for the ” show “. With selfies, she only lives for the show, than for the staging: as a woman, as a wife, as a mother. This last role is more difficult for her to assume.

Mother of a little Amanda of whom she is jealous, Veronica has a complex relationship with motherhood. The baby – whose cries make up part of the film’s soundtrack – steals the show and her husband’s love, but it will also be used as a “prop” to gain the two million followers necessary for Veronica Lara to win the cast of a famous brand of lipstick. To have his giant portrait on the towers of the buildings of Santiago and of a consumerist Chile where the media sell the dream with two bullets, that is his dream. This is the red thread of the film. Built in short sequence shots, to fit in with the format of the posts on the networks – a directing bias that can get boring – the film gradually reveals the personality of La Veronica and how far she can go to satisfy her need to be seen and famous.


If you think, you don’t live »

The colors are bright, vibrant. The swimming pool, very very blue, where the young women take their portraits, a symbol of the social success of the husband, is at the heart of the visual device. At the water’s edge, La Veronica lectures: ” the more things you know, the more you think, and if you think, you don’t live… And suddenly, you don’t profit from it. Looking at a photo of you, people want to see you enjoy because they enjoy life through you “. And to recommend to her companions to look stupid, because ” being stupid is also witty “. But La Veronica is far from being the idiot her empty smiles suggest. She lays the bricks of her social success one by one, a little girl from a modest background like her footballer husband, in a Chile where social networks and celebrity media set the tone.

Selected in several festivals such as San Sebastian (Latin horizons), Biarritz and Havana where it was awarded, the film rests largely on the shoulders of Mariana di Girolamo. We must salute the performance of the Chilean actress whose face has become familiar to us from the film Emma by Pablo Larraín -already a role of mother difficult to assume- and that we have been able to see again more recently in the series The pack (The jauria by Lucia Puenzo) broadcast on Arte. She plays with her expressions of astonishing plasticity and voice effects like during this sequence where, for her nephews, she makes the soundtrack of three characters from an animated series, linking the dialogues in an amazing way. If the film is released in a dubbed version, how can the production proceed to render this effect? Fascinating, definitely.

“La Veronica” by Leonardo Medel, on screens in France this August 17: the dark side of Veronica Lara, the prosecutor’s investigation into the suspicious death of little Camila. © Moonlight Films

Cinema: “La Veronica”, by Chilean Leonardo Medel, everything “for the show”