Love Letter to Love

In love, everything dissolves like clouds on a hot day

What happens when the boundaries of the personal blur with the boundaries of truth? In love, everything dissolves like clouds on a hot day. This is how we are introduced to Olivia and Ramon, the characters of the animated film Olivia and the Clouds by Tomás Pichardo-Espaillat from the Dominican Republic.

From the caresses of colors that melt into one another, to the life segments that the mind stacks upon what is meant to be the perception of a life lived, we meet a character,Olivia, who stammers in front of her son, turns into a plant in the presence of Ramon, and with herself is a shapeshifting entity plunging from sky to earth.

With a delicate style, full of soft and airy colors, blending idyllic landscape shots with intricate drawings, the film weaves fiction and offers us different perspectives on living with one of the core sensations that gives rise to the most tormenting illusions. Describing love is quite easy,we just need to flip through literary catalogs and world masterpieces that place obsession just one step away from love.

It’s worth highlighting the issue of perspectives that construct this animated film, as a truly modern work would not be such without bringing into play the so-called “objective truth.” The viewer will keenly seek a safe harbor to rest their doubts about Olivia’s well-being, but that will ultimately remain in the hands of each person watching—to carry with them the poetry and story that gives meaning to the film.

In a nearly Iago-like operation, the truth about Olivia’s feelings and perceived reality shifts with a flick of the hand. To build the realm where Olivia’s world exists, we can place it among similar events in other global narratives: for some, it might evoke the saltiness of worlds where women live only in sensations and in the thinning of meaning like in the characters of Lispector; for others, it might recall Márquez’s Amaranta, who sealed her lips until death, living only within what her mind produced. Elements of near-physical obsession can be likened to Laura in Williams’s The Glass Menagerie, or to various heroines of Elizabethan literature who turn mental activity into the soil where imagination and possible worlds,fragments of who we could be, are sown.

The film is divided into three chapters. First, we meet Olivia and her clouds, where we see how her son perceives her: as someone he must care for. How her partner sees her: as an individual from whom worry and fantasy can be spun. How others who know of her existence perceive her: compressing her entire experience into a single word – “pity.”

Meanwhile, Olivia finds her path through her memories, through the pieces of information that give shape to her world. This effect of different perceptions finds its place in language through the Rashomon effect, which contains three key elements: a narrative line told through varying perceptions, narrative voices focalized through their sensitivities, and a linear storyline that is broken and fragmented, with neither a clear beginning nor end. This is where Olivia finds herself.

In the second part of the film, we meet Ramon and his plants. With a body made of receipts, he sways between the grass and the home while tending to Olivia like a potted stem with leaves. He speaks in a voice called Olivia, but we never know how Olivia actually appears through his eyes.

In the end, Olivia and Ramon are wrapped in the purpling sky, in the dissolution of clouds, in the tumbling of flowers whose colors and shapes devour each other all to articulate the emotional reversal, to metaphorize it to the point where putting the emotion into words becomes almost impossible.

All of this is to give you a taste of what it means to become familiar with Pichardo-Espaillat’s work, which draws inspiration from the entire Latin tradition to dismantle performative euphemism while perfecting narrative tension.

The film Olivia and the Clouds will be shown at Anibar on July 17th at 12:00 PM at “Jusuf Gërvalla” Cinema.

P.S. Don’t forget to bring some tissues.

Author: Blerina Kanxha