‘Beloved Tropic’ Review: Paulina García Shines in Tender Drama
“Being a mother won’t save you from anything,” Mechi (Paulina Garcia) confides in Ana Maria (Jenny Navarrete) in “Beloved Tropic” during a rare moment of clarity, turning attention away from her own health as she is slowly succumbing to dementia. The two are brought together by the precarious immigration status of Ana Maria, Mechi’s pregant caregiver who requires a steady job to remain in Panama after leaving her home of Columbia three years prior. The nurse thinks a child might help if the paperwork doesn’t come through. But in director Ana Endara’s compassionate drama, her characters find a safe haven where they least expect it.
A good old-fashioned tearjerker with some enlivening flourishes, like the orchids that peek out of the shrubbery in Mechi’s garden, “Beloved Tropic” opens with a relatively modest offer from Mechi’s daughter, Jimena (Juliette Roy), to Ana Maria: $140 a week for an eight-hour day job, with the added incentive that if it works out she’ll have her lawyers take care of her immigration situation. Ana Maria never looks too desperate to accept, but she does bring up the papers any time she can and her anxiety can start to be reflected in her growing belly, which is almost immediately revealed to be a fake. The unexpected bonus, however, comes when the 16 years she’s spent taking care of seniors results in Mechi warming up to her after previous caretakers have had little luck. The self-made businesswoman operates in a different reality, not only because of her deteriorating mental state, but also the fact that she’s been cushioned by wealth.
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It is her worsening condition rather than the genuine bond that they forge that leads Jimena to offer Ana Maria a full-time position, an indication of the kind of relationship Mechi has with her children, who have used her wealth to distance themselves from her, leaving an empty house besides her maid Cristina. Although the tale of a caregiver melting the heart of a cantankerous senior is practically its own genre by now, Endara and co-writer Pilar Moreno find it to be a compelling jumping off to explore a relationship dynamic that isn’t exactly maternal or, even especially friendly, but still deeply meaningful. Mechi can end up offering as much comfort to Ana Maria as she’s receiving when both feel adrift, detached from blood relatives. Of course, that only comes after Ana Maria is tested by Mechi, who has become more prone to losing her train of thought, but she still very much has her wits about her.
García and Navarrete both give beautiful performances that prevent the film from ever feeling too heavy, although Endara’s commitment to something more ambitious than simply seeing Mechi and Ana Maria connect can occasionally lead to some extraneous strands. While it makes sense for Ana Maria to go through the motions of pretending to be pregnant for appearances’ sake, her solitary visits to a maternity clinic where chitchat with fellow patients inevitably reveals thoughts on parenthood start to seem awkwardly incorporated to serve a main idea rather than the story, looking even more out of form when Endara generally finds graceful ways into her characters’ heads and summon the world around them. Occasionally taking Ana Maria back to her past in Columbia with the mere sound of the ocean and presenting Mechi’s decline in the expressions of others who remember what she was like before, “Beloved Tropic” leans away from the melodramatic in favor of a quietude that its characters begin to find in one another. When peace of mind appears so elusive to them, that Endara delivers such a feeling to audiences is particularly rewarding.
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