Candy-coloured recreations of one woman’s pregnancy unravel as dark truths are revealed in Maite Alberdi’s intimate docudrama
This cheekily inquisitive docudrama by Chilean director Maite Alberdi features a unique variation on the long con, and one with a precise duration: nine months. After suffering three miscarriages and under pressure from her husband and in-laws to give them a child, Eleonor Alejandra Marín Mendoza (aka Ale, and played by Ana Celeste in re-enactments) decides to fake her next pregnancy. She is determined to have something to show at the end of it: after meeting single mother Mayra, who wants to abort her second pregnancy, at the hospital where she works, Ale agrees to take her baby once it is born.
The details are hardly believable: eating copiously to gain weight, Ale manages to convince husband Arturo (Armando Espitia) and his family that this pregnancy is on track for her entire term. She reflexively tenses her muscles while he strokes her baby bump and smiles through a swirl of conflicting thoughts at her baby shower. While most con artists must dupe themselves on some level, it is true down to a physiological level in Ale’s case: a judge later testifies that her desperation to bear children may have resulted in a pseudo-pregnancy. How else to explain that the doctor signing off her maternity leave appears to hear the baby’s heartbeat?
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