‘The Meltdown’ Review: Slow-Burn Mystery Set in Chile’s Wintry Andes
Maya O’Rourke in 'The Meltdown.'
Courtesy of Les Films du Losange/Ronda Cine
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As The Meltdown (El Deshielo) begins, vintage news footage reveals the strange-but-true sight of something being lifted out of a frosty sea. It’s a huge chunk of an Antarctic iceberg, on its way to becoming the centerpiece of Chile’s pavilion at the 1992 world’s fair. As a symbol of national ingenuity and know-how, the frosty specimen is kind of out-there. And yet, for a country emerging from 17 years of military rule and determined to redefine itself, it represents an understandable leap of faith. It’s also an apt starting point for a movie in which submerged things come to light, if only briefly — a coming-of-age story where the key lesson is to keep what you know to yourself.
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Manuela Martelli’s well-received debut, 1976 (aka Chile ’76), a selection of the 2022 Directors’ Fortnight, took place during Chile’s Pinochet era. The writer-director sets her sophomore feature barely two years after the country shook off the despot’s iron grip. Inés, the lead character, was born in the final years of the dictatorship. A cherub-faced 9-year-old with an old soul, she watches the grown-ups around her calibrate their actions to a shifting world. Truth, she discovers, is less important than the ability to anticipate how people will react to it.
The Meltdown
The Bottom Line
Haunted and haunting.
Venue: Cannes Film Festival (Un Certain Regard)
Cast: Maya O’Rourke, Saskia Rosendahl, Maia Rae Domagala, Jakub Gierszal, Paulina Urrutia, Mauricio Pešutić
Director-screenwriter: Manuela Martelli
1 hour 48 minutes
Watchful, precocious and utterly un-cutesy in the compelling performance of Maya O’Rourke, Inés moves freely around her grandparents’ mountain ski lodge while her mother and father are away. It’s not clear whether they’re bureaucrats, scientists, artists or entrepreneurs, but they’re in Spain as members of Chile’s iceberg-delivering delegation at Expo ’92 in Seville. While her grandmother, Techa (Paulina Urrutia), and grandfather, Ricardo (Mauricio Pešutić), are busy entertaining potential investors, Inés basically has the run of the place, a tightly operated and pleasingly dated hotel in a remote corner of the Andes, near a ski lift. Inés is friends with the pair of hardy dogs who oversee the property, and moves easily among the hotel’s employees and, later, when she’s in detective mode, its guest rooms. She hangs with receptionist Sonia (Paula Zúñiga) at the front desk, trades greetings with Sonia’s brother, bartender Genaro (Luis Uribe), and, against Techa’s wishes, slips into the room of housekeeper Paty (Daniela Pino) when she doesn’t want to sleep alone.
Inés becomes fascinated with one of the guests, a German skier about five years her senior. Hanna (Maia Rae Domagala), the only girl on her training team, is also its star, but her dwindling drive frustrates her coach, Alexander (Jakub Gierszal), whose bond with Hanna appears more complicated and troubling each time the screenplay places them together.
Inés approaches the teen with a homemade gift, and despite their age difference, they bond readily, two girls separated from their parents, English their common language. Hanna shares her broody music and dark nail polish, and alludes to strained relations with her single mother, a former skating champion from East Germany or, as Hanna calls it, “a country that doesn’t exist anymore.” German reunification took place within months of Pinochet’s replacement as president, and Martelli’s screenplay is sensitive to a child’s-eye view of dramatic geopolitical events. Wise-beyond-her-years Inés is vaguely aware that a brother of Sonia and Genaro’s is one of Chile’s desaparecidos, assumed murdered by the government.
Exploring the snow-covered mountain, the girls skip stones on its frozen lake and traipse through its defunct military outpost, a piece of land that Inés’ grandparents are determined to sell to a couple from Madrid. With visions of a high-end skiers’ destination and a substantial payday, Techa cautions her granddaughter: “Behave yourself while the Spaniards are here.”
But troubling events intrude on the Spaniards’ visit: One morning, after an eventful evening that includes s