Note: Review contains a few of many spoilable plot points.
Petra, the sixth feature from Spanish arthouse director Jaime Rosales, turns on the tensions and repercussions of withholding and disclosure, as it follows the titular character’s search for her biological father, leading her to the Catalan estate of a singularly cruel patriarch, Jaume (Joan Botey). The film opens in media res, with a title card that reads ‘Chapter II’ and the introduction of Petra (Bárbara Lennie) into ‘Jaume’s world’. At first, this world seems to refer to Jaume’s dominating role not only over his family and land, but also over a team of artist assistants. Jaume, we discover, is an ageing, hugely successful sculptor and installation artist, with whom Petra stays under the pretext of being an artist-in-residence. Yet, as the film unfolds, it lays bare Jaume’s abusive relationships with women, the artists who work for him, and his adult son, Lucas (Alex Brendenmühl). ‘Jaume’s world’, Petra suggests, is closer to a kind of patriarchal imaginary.
As an operatic family drama, shot through with two suicides, one murder, sexual assault, and (il)legitimate children, the story draws on conventions of Greek tragedy and classical melodrama. Formally, however, Petra is an exercise in restraint. This restraint prevents the film’s unconventional structure from coming off as mere auteurist/male hubris. The film is structured in seven non-chronological chapters, whose on-screen titles (with one notable exception) reveal the central plot point to come. This disruption of spatiotemporal continuity diminishes the emotional arc of the story, if only to re-orient it – withholding and disclosing narrative information in ways that subvert spectatorial expectations of psychological and narrative legibility. Instead of opening with Chapter I, which shows Petra caring for her dying mother and identifying Jaume as her possible father, Petra presents ‘Jaume’s world’ without context, only intimating the film’s complex relational cartographies. We study Petra as she navigates quiet tension with Jaume’s wife, Marisa (Marisa Paredes), and romantic connection with their son Lucas, a photographer. The precise nature of the characters’ relationships, however, is purposefully uncertain. The film eschews dialogue conventions of shot reverse shot; instead, conversations are captured in glacial tracking shots, which often move between speaker and listener at a pace that momentarily withholds apprehension of the latter’s response. Other times, the film’s non-chronological structure curtails our interpretive capacities. In an early scene in the film, Petra recoils from Lucas’s advances – the significance of this gesture emerging only later with the question of Jaume’s paternity. Yet, the scene’s conversational tenor – a flirtatious exchange prompted by Lucas’s jocular ‘confession’ to the murder and bodily dismemberment of women – is never explained. Instead, by priming us for Jaume’s introduction, this evocation of violence against women links father and son, pointing towards the film’s exploration of familial inheritance – the ways in which abuse and trauma are passed from one generation to the next. In refusing to disclose Jaume’s name, Petra’s mother attempts – yet, ultimately fails – to protect her daughter from the trauma of his abuse.
Cut to Jaume’s housekeeper, Teresa (Carme Pla), naked in a doorway. The camera slowly tracks backward, revealing Jaume atop the crumpled bedsheets. His abuse shifts easily from sexual to verbal: he speaks at Teresa, his voice low and cutting, criticising her for not enjoying non-consensual sex, for being an ‘easy woman’. He warns Teresa he’ll tell her son, Pau (Oriol Pla) – a fatal declaration that leads to two deaths. As if compressing time, the camera pans right to reveal a now-empty bed – the shot’s extended duration attunes us to the room’s silence. Here, and throughout the film, Hélène Louvart’s glacial cinematography keeps us in a state of heightened attentiveness. The camera repeatedly lingers at thresholds, probing domestic spaces before following – and subsequently visualising – off-screen voices. As the camera independently moves toward and detaches from the action, we are made intimately aware of what lies off-screen – the limits of our perspective. This restraint is echoed in the muted expressiveness of the characters and sparse use of music. Composed by Kristian Selin Eidnes Andersen (a frequent Dogme collaborator), vocal harmonies intersperse Petra, bridging transitions between scenes and chapters. In their position and sounding of the multiple, these musical intervals recall the structure of the chorus in Greek tragedy.
While Petra’s narrative veers towards a certain timeless universalism, its focus on a certain type of art grounds us in the contemporary. Lucas’s photographic project, for instance, references Spain’s recent exhumation of mass Civil War burial sites. More striking is the way Petra mobilises art to dramatise – and critique – the gendered dynamics of ‘Jaume’s world’. We watch Petra in his studio as she films her body in motion, before isolating a singular gesture which she then transfers onto the canvas. The mise-en-scène sets the gestural choreography of Petra’s intimate self-portraits against Jaume’s towering, brute metal sculptures: a vision of masculinist art – think Richard Serra meets Antony Gormley – which frequently overwhelms the screen. An extended scene of Jaume’s criticism of Petra’s paintings, moreover, rehearses the same language as many a misogynist reading of women’s art and expression: it’s too self-absorbed, too solipsistic, merely therapeutic! Petra’s encounter with Jaume triggers more than her abandonment of art. After Jaume falsely denies his paternity, the film traces the repercussions for Petra, who has since had a baby with Lucas. Petra’s shift from painting to motherhood is neither a character arc nor a strategy of narrative containment, but instead a testament to Petra’s internalisation of Jaume’s critical voice (and, of course, a particularly melodramatic plot device). The final chapters self-reflexively play with spectatorial expectations of incest and patricide, only to subvert them – each time exposing Jaume’s abusive behaviour and priming us for the catharsis of his fall from grace. At a time when the feminist revenge narrative risks a descent into cliché, Rosales’s decision to withhold the film’s central affective event, to displace the patriarch’s fall onto a secondary storyline we’d all but forgotten, proves all the more effective.
