Fear, sadness and a love that took a long time to arrive for a woman who has a month to live are the themes that Fernán Mirás addresses with unbridled black humor in “Almost Dead”, starring Natalia Oreiro. Mirás’s second film as director, after “El peso de la ley” (2017) -a judicial story that at times also transitioned into comedy-, is a free version of the Spanish film ‘Bypass’ (2012) and is centered on María (Oreiro), who suffers a cardiovascular accident that leads to a devastating diagnosis: in just 30 days, coinciding with Christmas Eve, her life will end.
“For me, good comedies must have a very strong anchorage in reality,” explains Natalia Oreiro in a study by the Non Stop production company in the Buenos Aires town of Munro, “although they are films to make people laugh, they also go through the essence of the human being because they talk about issues such as life, death and also friendship”, completes the actress, in a definition that fits the story that “Almost dead” tells.
The story focuses on the protagonist who has a few days left to live and is in the care of Paula (Paola Barrientos) and Lucas (Ariel Staltari), although Javi (Diego Velázquez) is missing, who completes the trio of close friends from childhood and with whom she has always been in love.
“One can do humor when it doesn’t hurt the other, when it doesn’t disrespect him,” Oreiro draws the line when asked about the limits of comedy, “but in this case, he doesn’t talk about the death of others but about the own”. And he goes on, “There are things that don’t make me laugh, I don’t agree so much that times have changed, the things that don’t make me laugh today, didn’t make me laugh 20 years ago either, but -he clarifies-, that doesn’t mean say that I do not love black humor, such as the one made by the English, which are super acid ».
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Comedy of entanglements and situations that start from a fatality, the story is set in the time that María has left, who has to accelerate definitions that go from consumerist desires to confessing her love for Javi, who lives in Montevideo and is in a relationship with Julieta (Violeta Urtizberea).
If time sets the pace for “Almost Dead”, it is also the essential element of comedy in all its variants, which Fernán Mirás studies as one of the genres he is passionate about.
«I am interested in genres and I feel that I am a director who is learning to direct», confesses Mirás, «there is a study by the writer Henri Bergson called ‘The interference of the series’, which is when two people talk about two different things , the viewer knows it but they think they are talking about the same thing», he explains. “That happens, for example, in that final dinner in the film, with many characters where each one believes that he is talking about another person and something else and that gives rise to many situations.”
Humor, even in harsh themes, was already present in Mirás’s debut, who tells that for “Almost dead” the inspiration was movies and Italian idiosyncrasy.
«I really like Italian cinema, I think that we Argentines are quite like them in our way of being, apart from the fact that we have other immigrations» and he goes on, «there is something in Italian cinema of a kind of daring to laugh at half-nonsense things and characters who can do weird things and I thought about that a lot based on this story.”
And he adds that the film “seems to be about death, but in reality it is a story about the fear of death.”
Back with Oreiro, the actress spares no praise for Mirás.
«I admire Fernán a lot as an actor, he has an incredible sense of humor and a very particular look», he highlights, «as an actor he understands the neura of the interpreters, that’s why I gave myself completely to what he asked of me, because he was going to know how far I could give».