27 Nights

Bluesky

Single ladies of a certain age are having a moment in cinema, whether it’s taking down scammers (Thelma), becoming unexpected heroes (The G, Dead Of Winter and The Crow In Winter) or refusing to be put in a care home by their children (Calle Málaga). Now 83-year-old party girl Martha Hoffman (Marilú Marini) joins Calle Málaga’s Maria Angeles in rebelling against her daughters. While the end result doesn’t have the directorial verve of Maryam Touzani’s film, it’s a solid crowdpleaser which allows Argentinian star Marini to showcase her talents, and a good choice for the opening night film at San Sebastian Film Festival.

The nights of the title refer to the time Martha spends in a psychiatric hospital after being forcibly committed by her daughters Myriam (Carla Peterson) and Olga (Paula Grinszpan) and which are stitched through the story of what happens after she is finally allowed to return home, albeit rather inelegantly.

Her daughters claim she has frontotemporal Alzheimer’s but there’s a big question mark over whether it isn’t the health of her estate that they’re more concerned with as Martha has a large art collection and is very generous with the group of younger counter-culture artists that make up the vast proportion of her friend group. Assigned to decide whether or not Martha “has a screw loose” or not is psychiatrist Leandro Casales (played with crumpled earnestness by Daniel Hendler, who also directs). As is the way of this sort of movie, it is he who will spend most of the movie undergoing a transformation rather than the self-possessed Martha.

At its heart, this Netflix comedy drama hinges on what we put a price on in life. While Martha’s kids might suggest she has “lost the notion of the value of things”, Hendler and his co-writers Mariano Llinás and Martín Mauregui suggest it is they who are failing to realise their own mother is priceless. The fact the story is adapted from a book by Natalia Zito that is rooted in real events, underlines the film’s more serious aspect, although it is generally handled with a light touch by Hendler – although the plinky-plonky scoring from Pedro Osuna feels somewhat rote compared to most of his work on the likes of Argentina, 1985.

The hospital portion of the film feels rather choppy compared to the encounters outside in the real world, mainly because this sort of genre film doesn’t have time to get into much in the way of subsidiary character development. Still, Julieta Zylberberg also offers some nice comedy grace notes as Casales’ assistant and potential love interest. Most importantly, the chemistry between Marini and Hendler has plenty of pep and the scripting isn’t scared to show that Martha is ageing in some ways but that she has every right to do so as ‘disgracefully’ as she likes. Marini is the main attraction here, however, the sense of her character's desire for freedom and lust for life sparking infectiously from every interaction.

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