This year’s Chattanooga Film Festival is full to bursting with gems from all over the world and across all genres. From animation to found footage to things that creep under your skin, Chatt Fest has gathered them all, ripe for your enjoyment. One of the timelier entries in this year’s lineup is Argentina’s THE ATTACHMENT DIARIES from writer-director Valentín Javier Diment, in which a desperate young woman seeks an abortion and ends up wrapped in a mutually damaging but no less alluring relationship with the doctor providing her treatment.
Classifying a story like that as an “erotic thriller” might seem unusual given the thematic heft it bears, but there is truly no other realm in which it could comfortably fit. Lola Berthet’s turn as the doctor, Irina, is masterfully balanced out with Jimena Anganuzzi’s desperate and deceptive Carla. The chemistry between them is immediate and constantly simmering, and the explosive results of their confrontations with the rest of the characters who threaten to pierce their intoxicated bubble are perfect results of constant public repression.
Carla, too far along for an abortion, is talked into giving her baby up for adoption to one of Irina’s patient couples who are unable to conceive for themselves. While caring for her, the two become inextricably intertwined in a sometimes joyous and tender, often violent relationship. What unfolds is a visually bewitching journey through their mutual toxicity and pleasure as Irina fights to save the woman she loves while struggling to hide the relationship that would condemn her medical practice to its end—although she seems just as at risk of losing her medical license for performing abortions in secret for people in need as she does for being queer.
The lead performances by Berthet and Anganuzzi are immediately arresting, as is the sweeping cinematography by Claudio Bieza. Imagine a world in which Daphne Du Maurier’s Rebecca is tweaked ever slightly to allow for the lead character and the untamable force that is Rebecca herself to join together rather than being smothered in mysterious longing and repression and you’ve got the mood of THE ATTACHMENT DIARIES. Somehow the dynamic between Irina and Carla feels to be constantly in flux, so that when one is showing weakness the other dominates, yet both women are incredibly strong in their own ways, often leading to a constant push-pull of love manipulation until we cease being sure who the true victim and perpetrator might be. The only honest answer is both; and yet neither woman is necessarily outright villainous. Their motives are rooted in revenge for wrongdoing committed on them by men in their lives, which have left grotesque scars on their psyches so that we cringe and recoil at their responses even as we understand them.
“Erotic thriller” is one of those genres that seems to be looked down upon for being the kind of cheap fodder akin to melodramatic Lifetime movies. A genre which had its heyday at a certain period but has since died out and been revisited as less than its fellow genre films. And yet. There’s something at the center of the erotic thriller genre which THE ATTACHMENT DIARIES is so rooted in that it could not be classified as anything else. It is a film about feminine rage and power reclamation in a society which seeks to demonize and snuff out anything which strays from the norm, whether that be not wanting or being able in some form to have and support a child or engaging in a non-heteronormative relationship. What makes ATTACHMENT DIARIES perverse is just the same thing that makes it an irresistible watch: these women perform acts and display their bodies in ways that directly counter social expectations. We are given, for example, a close up shot of Irina performing an examination of Carla’s vagina during a routine checkup. While it is cast in a clinical light, even then the draw Irina feels toward her patient is palpable, yet nothing about the shot or the moment is done in poor taste or for any sort of melodrama. It’s shocking for being a confrontation with the body in such a way as we are unused to seeing, but it is not exploitative or even sexual.
THE ATTACHMENT DIARIES is a polished, shining example of art when we need it most. By pure (and unfortunate) happenstance, movies like it in which abortion is a building block on which the story pivots—although in this case it is both central and more below-the-surface than you might expect on plot description—are feeling more necessary than ever. Art imitates life imitates art and on and on it goes, in a never-ending cycle, but sometimes, done just the right way, as ATTACHMENT DIARIES is, they can feel like a light in the darkness.
Donate to your local reputable abortion healthcare organization, and keep an eye out for THE ATTACHMENT DIARIES.
Tags: 1970s, abortion, Argentina, black and white, Chattanooga Film Festival, Claudio Bieza, Daphne Du Maurier, erotic thriller, Film Festivals, Foreign Film, Healthcare Horror, Jimena Anganuzzi, LGBTQIA+, Lola Berthet, Medical Horror, Queer Horror, Rebecca, The Attachment Diaries, Valentin Javier Diment
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