3 (Pablo Stoll Ward, 2012): Uruguay

Reviewed by Emma Karlsson. Viewed at Santa Barbara International Film Festival.

After having seen many feature dramas at the festival, I’m ready to sit down and watch Water, a documentary made by eight different Israeli/Palestine directors with their interpretation of water as my last film for the day. After a good talk with a documentary-lover next to me, the film starts playing. To our surprise the film was in Spanish, and seemed to include no images of water at all. In fact, the film turns out be another feature film. People in the theater starts to talk amongst each other. The lights comes on, and a nice, hardworking volunteer explains that the film has been mislabeled. The film showing is not Water. It is an Uruguayan film called 3. Tres. Or in English: Three.

Half of the audience decides to stay and watch the film, myself included. I’m already slightly intrigued by the story, and I rarely watch Uruguayan films so I figure why not.

The film tells the story about a somewhat dysfunctional family. Ana (Anaclara Ferreyra Palfy) lives with her mom Graciela (Sara Bessio). Graciela has been divorced to Ana’s father Rodolfo (Humberto de Vargas) for ten years. Rodolfo has remarried since then, but in the beginning of the film has feelings of wanting to return to Ana and Graciela. Slowly but surely Rodolfo manage to sneak his way into Ana and Graciela’s lives again, even though during the duration of the film Graciela falls in love with someone else.

The narrative follows mostly Ana. Ana is in many ways a typical teenager; she lacks in ambition and simply wants to enjoy life. She skips way too many classes and doesn’t care about her grades. She has a boyfriend who she keeps around just so she can kiss someone when she wants to. Ana, like her mother, is not very vocal; she expresses herself in other ways. She spends her days listening to music, eating food with her dad and watching soap operas with her mom. Her parents never push her into anything; they say nothing when the school calls in Ana for a talk about her missing classes for example.

After the film people expressed their disappointment. Perhaps it was the expectations of seeing Water that got crushed; instead they had to sit through a at times slow-paced Uruguayan coming of age flick. “Nothing happened!” someone shouted out, and I have to disagree.

Life is not a Hollywood 100min film. Life is about what happens when you just watch it happens. Life is about watching tv with your family. Adolescence is about trying to make sense to a lot of stuff at once. Ana as a character reminded me a lot of a younger me. Instead of rebelling, instead of hating your parents and getting super drunk at parties you’re not allowed to go to, adolescence for most people is about “waiting” stuff out. Waiting for something to happen.

The film is about how absurdity and reality co-exist. Sometimes life doesn’t make sense, but sometimes it does. 3, without even intentionally being in the festival’s program turned out to be one of my favorite films at the festivals.