Amador

Amador

The concept was there, but it was ruined by a disconcertingly sluggish lead performance. “Amador” is about Marcela, a Bolivian living in Madrid with her partner Nelson. Nelson runs a unique business where he sends out workers to pick up flowers from the rubbish that still look halfway decent. The workers wash the flowers, keep them in a fridge, spray them with flower scent, wrap them in paper and send a group of people to sell them on street corners and in cafes. I think I may have bought some roses with that ancestry off flower girls in Cannes.

Their fridge breaks and cannot be repaired. There’s a crisis over making payments for another one when Marcela (Magaly Solier) gets a job as a career for Amador (Celso Bugallo), an old man who rarely leaves his bed and spends his days building jigsaw puzzles with large pieces. He prefers sea and sky scenes because the whites and blues merge together and make them harder.

Marcela is an unhappy person who feels deeply. When she moved to Madrid at Nelson’s insistence she expected they would open their own florist; now she hardly has a home the business is run out of their apartment and when Nelson sticks letters on the fridge spelling out “Marcela’s Flowers”, somehow that doesn’t seem quite what he promised.

Amador is quiet and easy-going, aware that not much time remains for him. Marcela met Yolanda (Sonia Almarcha), his daughter, when Yolanda worked for Marcela and her husband, but they never visit. Marcela cooks Amador’s meals, helps him onto the toilet, exchanges listless conversation with him; there are many close-ups of her face as she thinks about herself and her life. Too many.

The character seems passive through no fault of Magaly Solier’s: we see a personality in the film, but not enough of it. She whiles away her time with Amador talking about love affairs, mermaids and herself he notices that she’s pregnant long before Nelson does. Amador remarks on the overpopulation problem: “But don’t worry. I’m on my way out, to make room for him.”

Amador has a visitor on Thursdays, Puri (Fanny de Castro), a plumpish middle aged prostitute who has been coming for years. She is wise and good company for Marcela. The peace is also broken by an intrusive neighbor who keeps trying to force his way in.

I won’t give away anything more that happens; we have been expecting it rather and Fernando Leon de Aranoa handles it well, with a number of surprises in store. On a purely narrative level this could have been a very good film. But his timing lets him down: again and again there are slow close-ups of Marcela as the wheels turn inside her head and she comes to conclusions that are pretty obvious by now. Much better could have been achieved simply through more rigorous editing.

The meaning is clear, flowers are one of the many symbols that we have (we treasure them because they are beautiful even when dead). The sea and sky also carry a lot of weight as does the speculation about mermaids. Heartless, ironic and “happy” all at once sums up this ending brought on by Yolanda who was always known as unaffectionate with others in the family until this point when she finally starts giving a damn about someone other than herself—but not enough to make it last forever.

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