The Future (Il Futuro) [2013]

Directed by Chilean filmmaker Alicia Scherson, The Future was a decent attempt at capturing a young woman’s coping with grief and loss, and the easy pitfalls that surviving alone in an adult’s world can lead one into when one isn’t matured enough to differentiate between choices. The film opens with the viewers being informed that Bianca (Manuela Martelli), who is in her late teens, and her strappling younger brother Tomas (Luigi Ciardo), have recently lost their parents in a car accident. An initial scene quickly established the two characters – while he intends to be a computer engineer, she, despite being the older of the two, is both clueless and disinterested as to what she wants to do in life, and this deep-set aimlessness leads her towards potential crime and life-long heartbreak. As the two continue to reside at their parent’s apartment, the impressionable Tomas befriends two guys from the gym who crash into their place indefinitely, and they coax Bianca into getting into a relationship with Bruno (Rutger Hauer), a former Mr. Universe and B-movie, but now a hulking recluse, in order to rob him. However, quite expectedly, the two end up forging an emotional bond. The scenes featuring these two lonely people craving for love and companionship, with both sensuality and emotional fragility thrown in, were among its better moments. However, the relationship, in the end, remained under-explored. Martelli, through her impassivity, was aptly cast as the aloof, introverted and confused girl who is discovering sexuality and inwardly searching for a father figure, both of which she finds in the ageing recluse, and that lent an air of palpable melancholia to the proceedings.

p.s. Watched this as part of 2013 Kolkata International Film Festival (KFF)

Director: Alicia Scherson
Genre: Drama/Psychological Drama
Language: Spanish/Italian/English
Country: Chile