Review by John P. Harvey.

4/5

In a small Argentinian mining town in the early 1960s, for the family of eight-year-old Maria Margarita (a remarkably expressive Alondra Valenzuela) the big day of the week, when everybody puts on his or her best clothes, is Sunday.  This is the day when the popular local cinema opens to screen the latest blockbuster, the family’s sole diversion from the town’s otherwise drab reality.  As its only reliable entertainment, the cinema serves as the town’s one bright spot.

It’s an existence that even Maria Margarita’s glamorous mother, Maria Magnolia (Bérénice Bejo), tolerates — until a mishap at leaves the family’s proud father, Medardo (Antonio de la Torre), without work and in need of the family’s support.  Suddenly even the family’s weekly cinema visit is beyond its financial reach.  By pawning goods and taking loans, the family manages to eke out an existence and send just one child to the weekly cinema screening, relying on that person to dramatically retell the story afterward for its second-hand entertainment.  Maria Margarita, far and away the best at retelling the tales, becomes the mainstay, and soon family guests, similarly deprived of the cinema, join in witnessing it and insist on paying for the entertainment, and movietelling become the family’s salvation  Even as a young woman, Maria Margarita (now played by Sara Becker) maintains this tradition.

In the meantime, the town’s miners increasingly realise that they have been exploited in order to maintain the privileged lives of the ultra-wealthy, and we see strikes and government strong-arm tactics, and finally Augusto Pinochet makes his move, becoming the ruthless dictator who would control the country for decades.  In the events leading up to that, Maria Margarita’s and her brothers’ efforts to keep the family going, with a little help from the sympathetic mine supervisor, Mr Hauser (Daniel Brühl), reflect the town’s problems and efforts generally.  But an unforgivable act by the local moneylender sets off a chain of misfortune that will take some overcoming.

A poignant drama offset with comic relief, set against a background of economic difficulties and political repression, The Movie Teller illustrates in microcosm the inevitability of interaction between personal choices and societal forces; but that illustration takes a secondary place to the evocative power of individual creative expression and passion as its leads depict masterfully.  What The Movie Teller gives both its internal audiences and its external audience is an insight into the power of words, with the help of simply staged and effectively acted drama, to draw their listener into the lives of others.

Screening at Palace cinemas.