There is a commune of transgender women who live in a Chilean desert. As a new plague begins taking hold, rumors run wild about how prolonged eye-contact or a loving gaze, shared with a gay man or transgender woman can lead to infection. Eleven-year-old girl Lidia is bullied about this by her male friends, since her mother Flamingo is a trans woman belonging to a close-knit community of “transvestites” and is sort of the beauty queen there. She herself is sick at this point. The girl take their revenge on the boys by beating them up. One night around cabaret performances, a man named Yovani shows up who turns out to be Flamingo's lover. He knows he is sick and internally he blames Flamingo for it. He shows extreme love to her but immediately violence in next minute and kills her. Fearing that the girls will take revenge, the miner community decide to impose restrictions on the women’s movement, to the point of entering their home and forcibly blindfolding them. In the process, the leader of the group finds unexpected happiness with an older miner while Lidia walks with the weight of unfulfilled vengeance on her shoulders.
I applaud the boldness and the poetic nature of the film, but honestly I was bored at so many places. The film has that coming-of-age neo-Western look and feel to it, which, I think will be an instant hit in the festive circuits, but for many simple audiences like me, the film will not be doing much favor. Also I am not sure what was the film trying to be. When Flamingo is killed, it feels the story is going to be about Lidia taking revenge, but it then meanders, telling the story of the matriarch and her beau—in a seemingly forced attempt at some kind of call for love and acceptance. There are many parallels of sort shown in the film like when the girls beat up boys who are bullying Lidia and they force them to look into their eyes, sort of equality demanding to be seen or men’s love and violent hatred exist in close proximity, obvious by Yovani's actions; the film is filled with many such metaphors only if someone will really get down to watching it. And honestly I did not have patience for that. Acting is good, the setting is good and the film is apparently the country's Oscar submission but it did not do much for me. I am sadly not an educated film-admirer. The film wants to be a grounded fairy tale as much as a Western, and for you to believe that there’s a hint of historical truth to the proceedings. Eventually, I am not very sure what was the point that this film was trying to make, if any. (4/10)
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