With the delicacy of a bee probing a flower for pollen, Basque director Estibaliz Urresola Solaguren picks her way through the tensions and dilemmas within a family where the youngest member, an 8-…
for a lead performer at the Berlinale’s award night Saturday, shows an instinctive, unforced and generous understanding of how difficult her character’s life must be. As Coco – the between-stools nickname the family has devised to avoid anything too specifically gendered – Otero is alternately obstinate, tearful, mischievous and withdrawn. She craves her mother’s comprehension but pushes her away when she tries to talk to her about why she doesn’t want to go to school.
Coco’s mother Ane is a sculptor, never happier than when she is in the workshop where her father cast used metal figures for the religious icon market, wearing his stained overalls and a welding mask, cracking plaster moulds or carving beeswax models like the ones her father made for budget customers. Family chat reveals that she went to art school and has now applied for a teaching post that will mean she spends a deal more time with the beloved tools she has inherited.
Coco’s turmoil comes into focus when Ane takes her three children back to the village in the Spanish Basque country where she grew up, where her father worked and where most of her family still lives. They are an abrasively intimate, inquisitive clan, quick to judge. Lita intuits almost immediately that Ane’s marriage is fraying and keeps returning to the subject, determined to nut it out of her.
Only her great-aunt Lourdes , a heavy-set woman in gumboots who has devoted her life to looking after her bees, seems at ease with Coco’s evolving self. Coco is at ease with her, too. When she is around the hives on the hillside, watching Lourdes smoke out the bees or clean the hives, she slips into referring to herself as a girl quite comfortably.
The beauty of this film is that Solaguren never tries to inflate Lucia’s confusion or discomfort with her mismatched body – at one point, she complains her toes are ugly – into a banner issue. She can’t put a name to what she is experiencing: she’s only 8. Nobody here is going to bang on about gender dysphoria. They just need to learn to live with the situation as each day unfolds, an acceptance that comes much more readily to the children than the adults who worry over them, meaning well.
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