MIFF Session 12: LA VERONICA

Veronica is shown in a little over 50 single take shots of a wide 2.35:1 ratio. From the moment the producer cards and credits are over she will be the centre of your screen for the next hundred minutes. Most of this time she will be talking, often rapidly and mostly narcissitically. Veronica, already famous as a model and social media star has become even more famous with her marriage to her native Chile's top footballer, the godlike Javier. They have one baby. Veronica needs two million followers to win the contract for the new cosmetics line that's currently being fought over in the Instaverse. When she tells her beautiful cohorts, often seen in expensive swimwear by the pool to put on a vacuous face for the selfie shot she is being ironic and deadpan serious at the same time. Word has leaked about a police investigation into the death of her previous child. Things have just got tricky.

So we move through each Veronica centred portrait, listening to her talk to an increasingly manipulated biographer, seeing her coldly distance herself from her new child, lash out at staff, friends or whoever comes into close proximity, and so on. With one exception this is not like the screen films of recent years, Host or Unfriended say, where we are following the story from a single point but one which contains many screens with their own character; here, we are looking at Veronica in a cinematic frame. In some cases this is presented as the work of a tv crew but mostly, it is the strident, instisting composition. Veronica, front and centre. The film's title La Veronica or The Veronica suggests the kind of casual idolatry long in use in the online-enhanced public area. Her name is shortened by those close to her to Vero, suggesting truth.

How does this work? First, it works by using its own mechanism with the casting of the narcotically beautiful Mariana Di Girolamo in the title role. Whether her face is stretched in rage or stress and even without the customary perfect makeup she still looks out through the frame, knowing that none of us are the fairest in the land. Di Giralamo is so breathtakingly committed to the role that she seems only to take strength from this constant close scrutiny, no longer able to distinguish it from nature. 

The cleverest shot among these is taken higher than it needs to go (as a gimmick) by her preformance. For once it's not Veronica at the centre of the frame but within the frame of a laptop that plays a parodic video of her. The biographer discusses it with her and eventually the video is paused in mid sneer bringing her face closest to ugly it will get here, we get to look at the still frame with its bratty contortion as Veronica protests at the unfairness of it. The screen goes into saver mode and for a moment all we see is the dots of the screensaver but in only seconds Veronica's reflection, there all the time, puts her right back in the centre, facing away from us but really facing us yet again.

In films so high concept we can forgive simplistic plotting as long as the concept is sustained. Do The Invention of Lying or Twins work until the credits roll? The first does but you need to look away from some glaring paradoxes. The second, well, Danny Devito and Arnold Schwarzenegger are twins so what do you care? Here we need to believe not that Veronica is incapable of murdering a child from narcissistic motives but that she might be innocent. This makes the scenes of police interrogation seem more like psychotherapy and can get unsettling close to seduction (and not how you might imagine). When she adopts a cause to boost her profile and has to meet one of the burns victims she is as smiling and inclusive as she is with anyone closer to her status. There is no wink to the moment, it's played as straight as anything else by the character but whether it is because the injured woman bears no threat and only kudos or that Veronica no longer needs to play this as a role is intentionally unclear. Even to the moment where the woman asks for the inevitable selfie with Veronica ("make a vaccuous face") the encounter feels both fresh and honest and chilling all at once.

And we, of course, admit as we are gazing that we too are playing. The blend of extreme intimacy and alienating glamour keep us fascinated. It isn't just because she is pretty. We seem to lose the ability to look away. As the finale calms to normal breathing and we smile at the use of screen interactivity we might well compare it to the failure of the ambitious but self-mutilating A Classic Horror Story which bent over backwards to be arch (nyuck nyuck). Maybe it just missed out on the power of sincerity on show here.