Nothing has to happen. Plot be damned. Movies are not about plots. That’s not how they started or where they are going. Movies are not about plots because it is not an essential component at all. Go ahead and make a movie without a plot. It will go about the same but without the exposition. Maybe you’ll cut out most of what you don’t need that way. Like a great sculptor, maybe you can chip away all the parts that are not a movie and just be left with the parts that are. We do not need to have any prescriptive ideas about that either, because movies can be anything, and some movies are anything.
Anything can happen if you let go of the plot and let every other element guide the movie. What happens in Tótem is not important at all. It’s a series of non-events. Moments of life lived between other moments of life, concluding eventually with a sad culmination, a revelation to the characters that does not have to be told to us because we so deeply feel it, a self-reflective composition built upon the components around it. Cinema works at a high level, letting go of function for the sake of the form, and letting the rest ride.
What’s happening in Tótem is also what is not happening. The shape of the movie is of disquieting avoidance. Events leading up to a party. A birthday party in the home. The sorrow-soaked moments refracted back to us as young Sol (Naíma Sentíes) seems to be the only one who is internalizing what is happening. She makes a wish early in the movie that her Dad would live but the rest of the movie suggests he might not live, that he may be dying from cancer.
Director Lila Avilés has not even concealed anything from us. She has centered all of her film’s emotions and they are the prime text of the movie. Avilés’ actors exist on a plane of pure naturalism. The shots are long and emotionally arduous, equally probing and affecting. So often the film can just rest on Sentíes’ face because she is an incredible child actor, who has the rarest combination of calm and sadness. There is a sense of a child’s intuition, of knowing what is coming, and what happens when the adults in the film do not admit the truth about the limited time the family has together.
A sensitive child in this situation would then think, but how are they acting like everything is okay and carrying on like things are fine, when this is the end of something, not just a birthday party, but presumably a last birthday party? There is so much wisdom in Avilés’ direction and in cinematographer Diego Tenorio’s camera, which exists as a natural observer, impeding upon the single-setting space but also allowing every room to breathe and then measuring the visual temperature of the situation.
There is a gorgeous restraint to the movie; it can do two hard things at once, allowing the denial of the family, as a means to protect the child, to be paired against the child’s direct awareness of what is happening. That doesn’t require a plot, really, just a curious camera and a crew that is dialed into how to make the most of this largely one-location setting. What matters most is what does not happen in Tótem. What matters is what the family is not saying and what it means when they do not deal with a serious event that everyone knows is going to happen. Nothing has to happen. They can just hang out idly and it will be just another birthday. At the moment, it does not have to be that final birthday. It does not have to be a processing of grief before the loss occurs, and yet, we realize that even in this framework, the most vulnerable person in the room is grieving the whole time. Nothing has to happen.