Montserrat Marañon plays the woman in the kitchen who is too busy to be sad, and lets you see the sadness anyway. Thirty years of Mexican cabaret, sitcom and stage stand behind one exact supporting turn in Tótem, and we would like to see more.
Fi1m perspective
In Tótem (2023) Montserrat Marañon spends most of a day baking a cake and steadily emptying a bottle while she does it. Nuri is one of the aunts getting a party ready for a dying man, and Lila Avilés never cuts away to make a joke of her. Marañon does not make one either. She keeps her hands moving, keeps the glass within reach, and lets the drinking register as something the character has decided not to notice. It is the kind of part that is usually played for a laugh or for a speech, and she gives it neither.
The career behind it is long and mostly unseen outside Mexico. She trained in dramatic literature and theatre at UNAM, and from the mid-1990s worked in cabaret, in children's theatre and with Seña y Verbo, a company making theatre for the deaf. The wide audience came with television: five years as Betzabé in the comedy series María de todos los Ángeles (2009 to 2014), followed by telenovelas. Film arrived in supporting parts from the middle of the last decade, among them Gloria in Tiempo compartido (2018), Yolanda in All the Freckles in the World (2019) and Marta in BARDO, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths (2022). We have not reviewed those and will not pretend to weigh them.
What we can weigh is the fit between what she does and where she is now being put. She is cast, again and again, in ensemble pictures about ordinary middle-class Mexican families under strain, and directors who work in close, with glances and pauses rather than gestures, get the most from her. Avilés is one of those, and Tótem is built out of a crowded house, a child underfoot and adults trying to hold a shape. Marañon's Nuri is where the shape gives, and we found her harder to watch than the illness in the next room, because the film had shown us the cake, the bottle and the party frock and asked us to add them up ourselves. We did, and it hurt more than we expected from a woman icing a sponge.
The caveat is size. One supporting performance is a small sample, and audiences at home know a broader, louder performer from the sitcom years than the one festival programmers have discovered. Whether the film parts grow to meet the stage training is the open question. On the evidence of Tótem, she will be the aunt in the kitchen for a while yet, and the good films will keep finding her there.
