NORA’S WILL (Mariana Chenillo). 92 minutes. Subtitled. Opens Friday (March 4). For venues and times, see Movies. Rating: NN
Nora’s Will takes place almost entirely in a Mexico City apartment, where the title character lies dead on the floor of her bedroom, preserved with dry ice. Nora has committed suicide, leaving behind a complete list of instructions for the people who will find her, right down to a reminder not to over-salt the food in the fridge.
And so, on the eve of Passover, her ex-husband, José (Fernando Luján), gets stuck dealing with sanctimonious rabbis, puttering housemaids and distraught relatives, all of whom seem intent on interfering with his own awkward grieving process.
In the first, pleasantly cantankerous half of Nora’s Will, the atheist José screws with the rabbis out of pure spite – ordering a forbidden pizza with ham, sausage and bacon to make it doubly blasphemous – and tries to determine whether an old snapshot he finds means Nora had an affair during their marriage.
Later, José’s son and family arrive to complicate things further, and writer/director Mariana Chenillo miscalculates the emotional stakes.
Nora’s orchestrated suicide may have been a clever gimmick on the page, but onscreen it’s a profoundly shitty thing to do to her loved ones. The movie keeps trying to brush it aside, but I couldn’t let it go.
