FAMILIA RODANTE (ROLLING FAMILY)
Chale Nafus
Director of Programming, Austin Film Society
We’re going straight to Hell.- Emilia, matriarch
Are families inherently tragic or comic? The easy answer is that most families are both tragic and comic, but at different times. What is tragic or disturbing for a family this year may be looked back upon as at least humorous or even absurdly funny the following year. But when one is in the midst of family tensions and dramas, it’s usually difficult to find the humor. As an audience watching FAMILIA RODANTE (ROLLING FAMILY), we can probably find a lot more comic elements than the family members themselves would appreciate.
84-year-old Emilia is the matriarch of this extended family on the road. Asked by relatives in her distant hometown to serve as a madrina (matron of honor) at a wedding, Emilia tells her family they will all go to Misiones for the wedding. Her decision is evidently to be obeyed, no questions allowed. This is a good excuse for Emilia to revisit her birthplace one last time before an inevitable death. Even though she doesn’t say so, her daughters intuitively know what this trip means to their mother.
These two daughters, Marta and Claudia, are married and have children. Always distraught, Marta, with somewhat long hair usually pulled back, is married to the overweight Oscar, and their three children are Gustavo (a teenage boy just discovering the joys and pains of his adolescent urges), Matias (a sweet younger boy who loves stray animals), and blonde dread-locked Paola, who has an infant child from her scruffy boyfriend Claudio. Quiet Claudia, who has rather short hair, is married to Ernesto, bespectacled and always complaining without doing anything to help. Their only child is Yanina, who invites her best friend Nadia along for the ride.
These eleven (and then twelve, when Claudio unhappily climbs aboard) people will jam themselves into a 1958 Chevrolet Viking truck with attached camper and go on a 1200 kilometer (745 miles) journey from the metropolitan area of Buenos Aires northward to Misiones on the border with Brazil. During the course of the trip, which takes several days, old desires resurface and new ones appear, creating tensions (both comic and dramatic) inside the camper. Just as in PRIVATE FEARS IN PUBLIC PLACES, several parallel stories begin unfolding and commenting on one another, often unknowingly but generally within the environs of the camper and truck.
To me, the funniest aspect of the film is that the adults never realize that a full-blown emotional/sexual affair is taking place among the three adolescents. The adults are so focused on their own psycho-sexual tensions that they are unaware of much else. Ernesto’s middle-age crisis of affection and desire is the stuff of absurdist humor (when it’s happening to someone else, just as all humor is funnier when someone else is the butt of the joke or ridiculous situation). There is simply not enough space for dangerous liaisons, as Ernesto will discover. Even Oscar’s hatred of his daughter’s babydaddy has some complex sexual overtones – jealous father disapproving of the man who gets his daughter pregnant and but doesn’t act appropriately. Once Claudio is added to the ménage in the camper, the tensions are even more complex. The irony is that these people are all rushing off into the countryside to attend a wedding, which will united two more souls/minds/bodies, who might end up being just as miserable as these city couples.
Throughout the course of this long trip in a nearly 50-year-old vehicle, the inevitable car trouble happens. Since director Trapero grew up in a family in which his father had a car parts business, there is a nice bit of humor in Oscar’s attempt to find a spare part for an old Chevy in a remote area. Ironically, Oscar owns an auto parts store in Buenos Aires, but he didn’t bring any spare parts on this trip. Heat, humidity, mosquitoes, cranky nerves, children, an infant, cramped space, and arguments all make for uncomfortable moments which can be funny or dramatic, depending on our point of view. Toll road fares and unexpected “road control checkpoints” all make Oscar’s blood boil, especially since some of his car documents have expired. Claudia’s toothache can only be funny in a movie – often a source of merriment in slapstick films, but in FAMILIA RODANTE the trip to the dentist allows Ernesto to make a move on his sister-in-law while his wife is safely involved with her dental pain. Someone else’s discomfort is often a source of humor in classic comedies. In fact, so much comedy is actually cruel. Having been in such a situation doesn’t always make us compassionate; sometimes, we laugh even louder because of memories of our own stupidity or discomfort. Mainly we are just glad that “there but for the grace of God go I.”
By the time he made FAMILIA RODANTE (his third feature film), Pablo Trapero was ready for such an undertaking. He was born in Ramos Mejía, Argentina in 1971 and graduated with a degree in film directing from the Universidad del Cine de Buenos Aires. In 1995 he produced and directed “Negocios,” a short film in which he cast friends and family members, including his grandmother Graciana Chironi, who would play the matriarch in FAMILIA RODANTE. Trapero’s first feature film MUNDO GRUA was released in 1999 and received the Film Critics Award at the Venice Film Festival. His second feature, EL BONAERENSE, premiered at Cannes in 2002. That same year Trapero created Matanza Cine, which produces Argentinean films as well as co-produces other Latin American films.
The following year Trapero decided to make a movie from the script he had written in 1996 (his first feature-length screenplay). This would be FAMILIA RODANTE. Although it wasn’t autobiographical, the cinematic structure of traveling with one’s family in a camper came directly from his own childhood during which Pablo and his parents and sister saw Argentina from their “casa rodante” (mobile home, which looks exactly like the one in the movie). As he had done with his short “Negocios” and in his first two feature films, he cast his grandmother Graciana, but here she would be the matriarch of an unruly family. Although not really the main character of the film, since the family with all its members is the principal focus, Emilia (Graciana) is the spiritual center of the family and is the one who provides the catalyst for the trip.
Trapero thought this would be an easy production – just a relaxed road movie with friends, cast, and crew. It was anything but that. Fortunately none of the difficulties off-camera showed up in the completed film. There were no problems with the cast, but the locations caused much of the difficulty. Route 14 (popularly known as the “road of death”) is a highly dangerous two-lane road, often used by trucks. Filming on that road day and night was a nightmare, but at least no one died. The scenes inside the camper were shot on location inside a second ‘58 Chevy with camper, but with breakaway walls for camera access. When it rained, they parked and shot scenes which didn’t require outside views, but the rest of the time they were moving down the highway with the cameras on a platform attached to the sides of the camper. Trapero wanted his cast to feel the discomfort of this long journey, so they would act accordingly. They did. When filming was over, most of the cast couldn’t wait to get back home in Buenos Aires.
In this mix of comedy and drama, Trapero revealed one of his philosophical underpinnings for making movies: “Films ought to give us the opportunity of broadening our horizons, if not to change reality which unfortunately is impossible. My films are clear and direct, but at the same time the most important thing is not in the dialogue but within the images.”
Sources:
• Isola Cinema
• JG Cinema.org, interview with Pablo Trapero [2005]
• FAMILIA RODANTE DVD, with interview of Pablo Trapero
• FAMILIA RODANTE, IMDB.com
