Things Fall Apart: Close-Up on “The Good Girls”

A one percenter watches her life crumble in Alejandra Márquez Abella’s seductive and brutal portrait of the 1980s Mexican elite.
Leonardo Goi

Close-Up is a feature that spotlights films now playing on MUBI. Alejandra Márquez Abella's The Good Girls is exclusively showing July 23 - August 22, 2020 in most countries in MUBI's Viewfinder series.

Sofía saunters through her birthday party with the regal gait of a monarch. It’s the early 1980s in Mexico City, and she’s hobnobbing with the country’s crème de la crème, a chatty contingent of men and women in glamorous clothes who’ve flocked to her mansion. The 1982 economic crisis has just broken out, but none of the guests can foresee its seismic consequences, the way the peso crash and President López Portillo’s policies will spell the demise of many of the country’s richest. The Good Girls, Alejandra Márquez Abella’s sophomore feature, is the story of a fall from grace. It starts off with the outside world at an arm’s length, watching as reality slowly catches up with Sofía's Xanadu, and all her illusions shatter. And yet it neither glamourizes nor demolishes her pampered class entirely. Straddling awe and satire, it captures that ostentatious milieu and its demise with equal delight.  

Sofía (Ilse Salas) has been living in the spotlight for quite some time. Her husband Fernando (Flavio Medina) inherited his father’s financial empire but not the old man’s acumen, and now that the kingdom starts crumbling nouveaux riches threaten to usurp Sofía’s throne. The Good Girls chronicles a year in her life. It understands affluence as a zero-sum game, and follows Sofía and her fellow “good girls” as they struggle to defend their place among the elite, sizing up new parvenus in an exhausting and near-endless series of coffee dates, birthday parties, salon appointments and tennis club rendezvous. Yes, it is all irremediably vacuous, a universe of shiny facades and fatuous people measuring each other’s worth by the nonchalance with which they’re willing to spend their fortunes. But that’s the film’s premise, not something Márquez Abella needs to prove to make this or that grand statement about the one percent. And even as The Good Girls makes no mystery around the emptiness of Sofía’s existence, it’s still unmistakably intrigued by the world she inhabits.

Much of that fascination harkens back to the film’s source text. The Good Girls draws upon a 1985 book of the same name by Guadalupe Loaeza. Loaeza, herself a “good girl” from a well-to-do Mexican family, turned her first literary endeavor into a savage and piercing portrait of the country’s wealthiest women, and writer-director Márquez Abella sponges up some of its ethnographic flair: there are moments when The Good Girls exudes the vividness of an insider’s account. Title notwithstanding, this is one woman’s show, and Sofía is hardly a bi-dimensional character, much less a caricature of a spoiled patrician. If the film doesn’t grant her much empathy, at least it trails behind her with endless curiosity.

Like Giulietta Masina in Fellini’s Juliet of the Spirits (a film with which The Good Girls would make for an interesting double bill), Ilse Salas first graces the screen in fragments, her face fully revealed to us only after an elaborate self-care routine. We see her cocooned and caressed by her maids, lulled and bathed in a state of omnipotent bliss. These everyday rituals are expansive: in the film’s gestalt, they acquire the stature of some solemn, world-building gestures, and even as Márquez Abella indulges in their theatricality, they never slow down the pace. Miguel Schverdfinger’s editing keeps matters down to a breezy 93 minutes, while Dariela Ludlow’s camera is almost always on the move, floating after Sofía’s fellow aristocrats as though intoxicated by the mix of expensive perfumes and cigars, or fetishizing this or that luxurious accessory through close-ups.

As the financial apocalypse looms nearer, a palpable sense of danger starts hovering above Sofía’s social gatherings. Gold-lacquered lipsticks, lighters, and sunglasses aren’t just markers of social status, but synecdoches of a world that’s slipping farther away from her. “We should stay on the sidelines,” a woman reminds Sofía as the latter questions Fernando’s business gumption. But Márquez Abella does the opposite, placing her lead squarely at the center of that decaying universe. Sofía is a matriarch, and when Fernando addresses her as “my queen” in a flickering moment of tenderness, the title feels surprisingly accurate. Her husband may be the man in charge, but she’s the first to wake up to the encroaching catastrophe, and the only one to look for a way out. While the family’s wealth begin to dwindle and the man embraces doom with resignation, Sofía rushes to organize dinners and lunches with the new hot names in town—ironically, the same parvenus she used to scoff at before the tables turned.

None of this is to suggest that The Good Girls glosses over the asymmetries of the society it captures. This remains a patriarchal milieu, but the stark contrasts between Fernando’s ineptitude and Sofía’s determination speak to the film’s overall cosmogony, in which men are pushed toward the periphery (just think how rarely husbands are brought up during the chats between Sofía and her friends, and how little the conflicts between women pivot on their spouses). And if Sofía feels so magnetic, stealing even the handful of scenes in which Ludlow’s camera doesn’t capture her alone, credit goes to Ilse Salas’s towering performance. Her metamorphosis from empress into desperate housewife is the film’s crowning glory. In one late scene, she’s out for dinner with Fernando and a couple of socialites who have taken their spot among the jet set. The night’s almost over when Mexican President López Portillo walks into the restaurant, instantly welcomed by every other patron with loud barks and insults as the man who led the country to an economic cataclysm. And Sofía joins in, forsaking her glacial composure to bark along with everyone else. In a film that should end with copious amounts of schadenfreude, The Good Girls tips its hand in a brief shot of Fernando, the only one doesn't bark and just stares at his wife, mouth ajar, equally stunned and repulsed by the desperation with which she’s fighting for her place in the sun. She’s pathetic, terrifying, and in a way, entrancing.

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