This year’s Giornate degli Autori unveiled a female focussed line-up that includes “Salon de Belleza” a moving opera prima by Nathalia Acevedo. Nathalia Acevedo (1984) has always wanted to direct. She established herself as a notable actress in Mexico, having played the part of ‘Nathalia’ in Carlos Reygadas’ ‘Post Tenebras Lux’ (2012- Light after Darkness) which won the Best Director Award at Cannes in 2012. She then worked with Filipino cult director Khavn De La Cruz in his 2014 film ‘Ruined Heart’ (shot by Christopher Doyle), but directing was always her ultimate aim. Her adapted screenplay of Mario Bellatin’s enigmatic novella is a very brave attempt to bring a very difficult subject to film.
Writer/Director Nathalia Acevedo
As his friends and colleagues start to die around him, El Individuo (the individual) a gay hairdresser finds that his beauty salon is gradually transforming into a space of succour for the sick and dying who have been ignored by society, and even by the very state services that should have been expected to help them.
“What was once destined for beauty is now dedicated to death.” Which he now calls ‘The Terminal.’
Sam Louwyck as El Individuo
Belgian multi-disciplinary artist Sam Louwyck's powerful screen presence as El Individuo holds the film together. Entering a world of existential suffering, he tries to help the sick who are brought to him in secret, at night. In a space where he judges no one, he cares for them to the best of his abilities without resorting to religion which he rejects. Despite looking through their wallets and meagre private personal effects (where he throws away the many saint cards) he ignores their names and only labels his patients with a number… gradually we see it becomes …#73… As they die, they are wrapped and carefully taken away by two lads in wheelbarrows who bury them in the sands by the shore.
All the while, El Individuo is carefully and meticulously also trying to care for his numerous tropical fish who reside in a large wall of aquariums, which, we discover, are his passion. Through the words of the narrator (voiced by Rodrigo Amarante) we hear El Individuo’s thoughts and, at times, we see his fragmented memories of happier times at the Salon and local bar karaoke, or with his lover at the seaside or at the sauna.
This story suggests the early days of the HIV/Aids epidemic, as fearful youths attack the salon with insults, stones and Molotov cocktails that crash against the metal shutters that El Individuo is careful to keep closed as often as possible. Within, in the dim penumbra of the enclosed salon, water filters down the walls- as El Individuo struggles with bowls and mops to keep the water at bay: -
“I would like to flood this place and turn it into a giant aquarium.”
We learn food for his patients is a soup he prepares once a day, as he toys with the idea of both starving his fish to death or restoring his aquariums to their heyday, aware that were he to succumb to this plague:-“No one would come for me.”
El individuo observes the lives of his fish who reveal shocking fishy habits When he first started keeping them, he decided to purchase three guppies, two females and a male. The male died almost immediately and the following day he saw this fish tank was a mass of tiny baby fish that had emerged from a pregnant female. However, only one hour later, every single one of these newborns had vanished, entirely devoured by the two females leaving El Individuo to mourn: -“… that such atrocities could occur in a small tank of water.”
The whole film is imbued with an atmosphere of sadness and an awareness of the tenuousness of our existence on this planet, be it from details like anthropologists digging up skulls to study, or rows of pig heads hanging on hooks at the market butcher’s shop. Mesmerizing underwater images or his aquariums mirror huge kelp and sea grasses swinging in the currents, creating the sensation of drowning that is slowly and inexorably building up at the salon. Is life just a mirage, like the outline of a ship on a horizon lost in the mist? Or the remains of a whole Greek town submerged between the waves? Forgotten cities and forgotten people, like Atlantis?
“All these memories that dwell in me, do they even exist in reality?”
Meanwhile, in the aquariums, the colourful fish continue to feed on their dead, while in the damp salon, the sick groan on their makeshift beds, even as El individuo gently washes their feet or holds their hands. There is an almost agonizingly slow calm to everything as if it were shot in slow motion. The musical score (by Lucy Railton) perfectly matches the mood and the enigmatic cinematography by DOP Balthazar Lab.
As the narrator tells us: -
“The living dwell on the dead, the dead inhabit the living, the dead bury their own dead.”
Then the living disinter them to study them, yet again.
An almost un-filmable novella has come to life with this interesting adaptation and meditation on what it means to live and to die in the margins of society.
SALÓN DE BELLEZA (Beauty Salon- 2026) directed by Nathalia Acevedo at the Venice Film Festival
WRITTEN Nathalia Acevedo and Diego Sepúlveda Martín / Novel: Mario Bellatin / Production company: Kingsugi Cine / Farol / Producer: Paulina Valencia, Christián Évora. Marco Tulio Pires, Matt Porterfield, Nathalia Acevedo/ Narrator: Rodrigo Amarante / DOP: Balthazar Lab / Editor: Olivie Neergaard-Holm / Production Designer: Nathan Parker / Sound Designer: Séverin Favriau, Nicolás Becker/ Direct Sound: Federico González / Original score: Lucy Railton /
Cast: Sam Louwyck as Individuo with Erwan Kepoa Falé as Juan.
