Film: Más que a Nada en el Mundo (More than Anything in the World)
Studio: Foprocine
Principal actors: Elizabeth Cervantes, Julia Urbini
Directors: Andrés León Becker and Javier Solar
Screening Date: May 18, 2008 Toronto Hispano-American Film Festival (www.thaff.com)
Film Length: 90 minutes
Rating: Unrated

Reviewer: Rodrigo Toromoreno (Toronto Correspondent - Canada)

A recently-separated mother attempts to raise her daughter without compromising her social life as a single woman. Although the premise of this Mexican production may seem familiar to those who have seen films such as Kramer vs. Kramer (1979), there is a crucial distinction: the Hollywood classic approached the subject from an adult's world, while the Latin-American film reserves its vantage point for the child protagonist.     

Emiliana (Elizabeth Cervantes) moves into a new apartment with her taciturn daughter Alicia (Julia Urbini) where they are neighbours with a terminally-ill man. Due to his cadaverous appearance, Alicia, influenced by her schoolmate's tales of the macabre, is led to believe that her neighbour is a vampire. This belief, along with the symptomatic noises of the man's ailment, is enough to prevent the impressionable child from sleeping at night and, in effect, interrupting the late-night dates that Emiliana ‘hosts' at her house as Alicia finds a haven in her mother's bed. After a sequence of failed relationships, mother and daughter equally reassess their own relationship as they try to restore it to the idyllic state it was before the move.

Andrés León Becker and Javier Solar are able to evoke the difficult nature of childhood when the child is seen as an intrusive figure in the turbulent life of adults. Low camera angles, reminiscent of those found in Ozu's films, establish that this is Emiliana's world as witnessed by Alicia. For this reason, overheard quarrels and maternal rages are magnified both literally and physically as the figure of the mother often extends beyond the limits of the frame. Nevertheless, Cervantes' ability to exercise restraint as an actor during her character's volatile moments of desperation prevent the film from crossing the proverbial line that can quickly turn a mature drama into a mediocre melodrama.  

It is this last point that works to the film's favour by constantly playing with the overall tone. At one level there is a script that authentically depicts the reactions of its characters when confronted with daily dilemmas; while an element of comic absurdity accompanies Alicia's naivety. The balance between these drastically differing components generates the engaging, albeit periodically acerbic, tone of the film. The analogy between the neighbouring Nosferatu, and the Emiliana's lecherous romancers who flee after they emotionally drain her, is one of the many elements that blend comedy with a bitter reality. 

Scored with a limited soundtrack and using a pallet of faded greens, the film avoids resorting to the escapism conventionally prevalent in superficial aesthetics and instead invites its viewers to experience struggle from the often-ignored perspective of a child. Sharing this achievement more with Victor Erice's complex Spirit of the Beehive (1973) than Robert Benton's award winning film, More than Anything in the World modifies the "struggling parent" genre to include innocence in places where it is usually unwelcome; something inherent of childhood that only the more renowned Cervantes could attribute to an adult in the figure of a windmill-fighting knight errant.