So Much Tenderness: Powerful Immigrant Story Showcases Director’s Cinematic Gift

By Karen Gordon

Rating: B

Writer-director Lina Rodriguez might be Canada’s best-kept secret.

The Colombian-born, Toronto-based Rodriquez is a self-assured indie filmmaker who makes quiet, thoughtful movies that walk softly, but convey deep and complex emotions. The characters in her movies — and their dilemmas — stay with you.

So Much Tenderness, her fourth feature film, centres around Aurora (Noëlle Shönwald), a Colombian environmental lawyer. When her husband Adrian (Juan Pablo Cruz) is murdered, she flees the country, and asks for asylum in Canada.

We catch up with Aurora a few years later. She’s living in Toronto with her strong-willed teenaged daughter Lucia (Natalia Aranguren) and has a few jobs, working at a daycare centre and teaching Spanish.

The two have gotten on with making a life for themselves in their new country, living in a pleasant, plant-filled apartment, and they seem to have made a happy place for themselves. They are thousands of miles from the danger and the violence, but also from their roots and their family.

Aurora stays in touch with her parents in Colombia thanks to regular internet phone calls.

But there is a dark piece to her family. Aurora believes that her cousin, Edgar (Francisco Zaldua) had something to do with the murder of her husband. So, when she sees him on the subway in Toronto one day, she is surprised and rattled. She gets off the train and follows him to his workplace and then starts to observe him.

All of this is set against the two women living their daily lives, hanging out with friends, making romantic connections. What we see feels very ordinary: each of the women at work, having conversations that are ordinary with friends or intimate with potential romantic partners. They are getting on with building their lives.

As usual with Rodriguez’s films, there’s limited exposition. Rodriguez is a confident filmmaker, who works with the lightest touch, often shooting documentary-style.

She creates an aura that is intimate, putting a lot of trust in her actors to convey their feelings in sequences where they may not be saying much, or doing anything extraordinary. She prefers to let us observe her well-drawn characters as they go about their day-to-day lives, leaving us to come to our own conclusions.

It’s a tricky way to go. She’s not aiming at manipulating our emotions or judging her characters. And she doesn’t artificially build tension or come to climax points. Rodriguez is so skilled at this that her unobtrusive, seemingly offhand approach ends up bringing us closer to the characters. It’s one of Rodriguez’s gifts as a filmmaker.

Another issue that concerns is that of the world of the immigrant adjusting to life in a new country.

Rodriquez focuses on how immigrants and refugees move forward in their new lives even if the ghosts of the past are never quite in the rearview mirror.

So Much Tenderness. Written and directed by Lina Rodriquez. Starring Noëlle Shöenwald, Natalia Aranguren, and Francisco Zaldua. In theatres June 30.