José is blasé when he discovers the body of his ex-wife, dead by her own hand and laid out comfortably on her bed. In his view, after many failed suicide attempts through her long life, success was just a matter of time, a simple case of practice makes perfect. That’s our first clue this is a black comedy, the typical kind that begins where tragedy ends, and then proceeds to draw death with a funny face.
What’s atypical here is the delicacy of the palette and the hue of the drawing – it’s more like a light black comedy. Or, less kindly, a slight black comedy, although, having awarded Nora’s Will the equivalent of its Oscar, the Mexican Academy of Film would clearly disagree.
But back to José, an elderly fellow who, in the 20 years since his divorce, has seen his beard turn white and his atheism grow entrenched. By contrast, the late Nora hadn’t lost her Jewish faith. Quite calculatedly, she killed herself on the eve of Passover, but not before setting the dining room table, filling the fridge with containers of prepared dishes, and leaving instructions for the gathered clan to hold the Seder.
And gather the family does – the son Ruben, his wife, their two young daughters, a nearly blind aunt, a beloved Catholic nanny, along with a dour rabbi plus various other delegates from the local synagogue. They all convene in the deceased’s apartment which, to the sound of doors opening and slamming, serves as the drawing room for the ensuing comedy.
The laughs have two main sources: first, the practicalities of religious law, whose edicts affect the timing and the place of Nora’s disposal. Apparently, since burials are prohibited during Passover and since Jewish cemeteries frown upon suicides, she died both at a most inconvenient moment and in a most inconvenient fashion.
Meanwhile, her remains are still in the apartment, packed in dry ice with the air-conditioning cranked up full blast – among the mourners, heavy overcoats are the fashion statement of choice.
The second comedic source is José’s curmudgeonly wit, as dry as that ice. He has scant patience for the rabbi and less for his laws. For him, “All religion is the same – it’s all just manipulation and money.”
Not that our devout atheist isn’t manipulative himself. For instance, twice he orders take-out – once, from a restaurant for a pizza slathered in ham and bacon, and then from a Christian funeral home for a polished casket and a floral cross. His grandkids, at least, couldn’t be happier. The tykes are tempted by the pizza and delighted with the casket – their games of hide-and-seek are now lined in satin.
Funny? Sometimes, intermittently, and more than an out-of-context summary can convey. Essentially locked into a single setting, director Mariana Chenillo proves herself an adroit choreographer smoothly guiding the characters through their drawing-room dance.
She’s much less adept when the narrative switches gears and looks for raw emotion in the customary place – you know, in the “secrets and lies” that always seem to spill from some locked desk at these family funerals. If the comedy is light black, the poignancy is just beige, as bland as it is dismissible.
Yet even in these shallows there’s a hint of depth, courtesy of Fernando Lujan’s exceptional work as the jaded patriarch. Like Javier Bardem in Biutiful, this is another case of a Spanish-speaking actor soaring above the material and finding what the script doesn’t – not just the arid wit and the tired cynicism in José, but the guilt too, and the remorse, and the tiny rivulets of feeling that still flow somewhere beneath his desert of dispassion.
Actors aren’t writers but, through a gesture here, a look there, a slight hesitancy, a tiny spark, Lujan does what only the best actors can – infusing the slightness not with actual substance but at least with the idea of substance, with a road map to where the writer could have located it. In Nora’s Will, his performance points the way.
Nora’s Will
- Directed and written by Mariana Chenillo
- Starring Fernando Lujan
- Classification: PG
