Petit Mal (2022) Film Review
Ruth Caudeli’s Petit Mal is a very intimate look into the lives of three women who have decided to stay together, living under the complicated dynamics of a throuple. Caudeli, working as a writer/director/actress in the film, has managed to capture the loudness of absence in a brutally honest film that can’t have been easy to make, considering it’s very realistic and inspired by her life and that of performers Silvia Varón and Ana María Otálora. It’s a great representation of something possible, but such levels of intimacy and the materialization of sorrow can’t be easy to make, as you stand behind the camera telling a story that doesn’t represent absolute happiness.
But Caudeli has no intention but to follow her instincts in materializing her own relationship and making an ultimately sad movie. Petit Mal is a complex study about an emotional breakdown that will possibly shatter your heart out of the absence of answers, but it’s also a fascinating representation of the dynamics of a very human relationship that’s not often depicted in film.
Petit Mal is told around a center of sadness and conflicting absence. When Laia leaves, she does so to follow a dream, but it’s seemingly unnecessary. She’s the center in a throuple, the glue that holds them together. She’s not aware of her force, she just follows herself.
When she departs, Marti and Anto live in a black and white world of chaos and dissonance. Their days are disorganized, they sleep during the day, and cry during nights. All they live for is trying to call Laia and remind her of them and all she left behind. The disconnection is apparent and hurtful. Laia seems to find something else in her experiment. When she cries out of yearning and longing, her girlfriends only see the evidence of the opposite. She has lost them.
In Petit Mal, the main conflict is slowly resolved in the third act. And the film actually goes balls to the wall when doing it, but it’s in a very peaceful, almost meditative way. Nothing is spectacular about how the two women left behind see the reality of absence and where it takes them. There’s no need for it to be like that. When they look at each other, all they see is the answer they don’t want to admit into their lives: their main fuel is gone, and they need to find something else that will boost them up.
But there’s light at the end of the tunnel. It’s clear Marti and Anto aren’t connected at first without the essential piece that holds the throuple together. But in the emotional void, amidst tears and sadness, they fall inevitably in an abyss of harsh truth and reality. And that outcome is something they can’t even get to mention and admit to each other. Their fear is too tangible. Yes, their lives are in color again, but perhaps Laia isn’t the reason or the fuel. Perhaps she’s just a memory, a reminder that love is found in the strangest, most improbable of places.
After a harrowing ending, many questions remain. Relevant questions about what the future may hold. A glance by Laia may hold the definite answer but Caudeli has no intention of revealing what stands in their way. Will they stay together under a frame of distrust? Will they learn how to work under the complications of a threesome? Will they be ultimately happy?
But at least the credits can cure whatever mark the film left you. Stick around and you will smile, and fill up your heart after an emotionally draining film.
