15/02/2014 - Subtle and beautifully shot, the film explores broken families and the controversial status of healers

After showing us the scorching heat of Lima in her Golden Bear winner The Milk of Sorrow [+see also:
film review
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film profile], Peruvian director Claudia Llosa moves to the cold winters of the United States and the large stretches of snow beyond the Arctic Circle in Aloft [+see also:
trailer
interview: Claudia Llosa
film profile]. Starring Jennifer Connelly, Cillian Murphy and Melanie Laurent, Aloft is both a family drama and an intriguing exploration of unconventional healings.

Jennifer Connelly is Nana, a single mother in rural America who tries everything in her power to heal her terminally ill son, Gully (Winta McGrath). Llosa is not at all generous with the details, but the audience soon realises that a healer had come to the region and there was a lottery organised in order to choose those who would be granted access to what the screenplay calls an “act”: a mysterious, enormous, fragile, beautiful and apparently curative contraption made out of twigs. But what if the healer tells Nana that her presence alone made an almost blind child regain his sight?

Llosa mixes together two parallel narratives, but the shooting style and the art direction are so similar that the audience might be surprised that almost three decades go by between Nana’s first act and the arrival of Jannia (Melanie Laurent), a French journalist who asks Nana’s other son, Ivan (Cillian Murphy), to go and search for his mother. Unfortunately, the family drama imagined by Llosa is far less absorbing than Nana’s story and its interesting implications. What if a healer cannot heal her closest ones? What if she must sever any contact with her family in order to achieve the greater good?

Although confused and anticlimactic, Aloft comes with some of the most beautiful cinematic moments in this year’s Berlinale. Many will be awed by the simple and effective sequence that probably gave the film its title: Nana stepping on a swing-like contraption with a sick girl in her arms, both swirling in the cold, snowy air. It is a magical, essential moment that suggests the subtle, invisible exchange of energies between the healer and her patient, and it’s almost irrelevant that the audience doesn’t find out the result of Nana’s second “act”. Llosa succeeds in stopping time with an amazing mixture of performances, cinematography and music, and reminded this reviewer of a famous saying by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry: “Perfection is attained not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing more to remove.”

After winning the Golden Bear and the Golden Globe for Best Foreign Film and receiving an Oscar nomination for The Milk of Sorrow, Claudia Llosa shouldn’t expect the same kind of attention for Aloft, although the film may win a trophy in Berlin for the great cinematography by Nicolas Bolduc, who uses snow, wind and barren landscapes to evoke the deserted world of an artist-healer who needs to isolate herself from everything and demands her followers to start an expiatory journey in order to take part in her act. Definitely not a film for everyone, Aloft is rich in symbols and may have as many interpretations as pairs of eyes that are watching it.