In Her Place

“Ladies and salesmen not allowed,” declares a sign outside a hotel in Fifties Santiago, Chile. Mousy court worker Mercedes (Elisa Zulueta) is outside, having sent a message to extract the judge she works for from his lunch appointment. It’s a task emblematic of her life, which is essentially being at the beck and call of men, not just at work but in the home she shares with her husband Efrain (Pablo Macaya) and their two grown sons.

Efrain is a photographer but it’s Mercedes who really has the skill set, passed down to her by her father, not that her husband notices. Although played with winning energy, Mercedes is bright and slight - perhaps because her character is a fictional one that has been slotted into a true crime framework. Maria Carolina Geel (Francisca Lewin), meanwhile, is the real deal, a successful author who famously, at least in Chile, shot and killed her lover in the Hotel Crillón’s tea room in the spring of 1955. Famous, fashionable and mysterious.

Given that the crime happened in full sight of a witnesses, Geel was immediately arrested and Maite Alberdi’s film - adapted from Alia Trabucco Zerán’s When Women Kill: Four Crimes Retold by Inés Bortagaray and Paloma Salas - imagines what happens when Mercedes encounters the case. Tasked with picking up clothes from Geel’s apartment after the writer’s arrest, Mercedes opens the door to a whole new universe. It’s not just the orderliness and space - emphasised by elegant production design from Rodrigo Bazaes Nieto and Sergio Armstrong’s camerawork. There’s a peacefulness here that is in sharp contrast to the noise and clutter of what she finds at home.

Is it any wonder she’s tempted to try on a lipstick? It marks the first step in what will become a low level obsession. Many a psychodrama has begun from this sort of basis but Maite - making the move to fiction after her well-received documentaries The Eternal Memory and The Mole Agent - and the writers have a much more gentle trajectory in mind.

Although there are tensions regarding the subterfuge employed by Mercedes, the trying on of the new life is concerned with emancipation and escaping her own life rather than any suggestion that she wants to take over Geel’s. There’s a cosy, tea-time mystery feel to proceedings, as the film becomes so protective of its central character it handles her with kid gloves. It’s easy to see why Geel, played with steely resolve by Lewin, proves fascinating to Mercedes, but the screenplay doesn’t dig very much into her psychology beyond presenting the facts of the case.

Instead, much of this is played for whimsical comedy, although there are some barbs where you might not expect them - not least the suggestion that women being murderous might be the only way they can achieve a better life under oppressive circumstances. In Her Place - Chile’s Oscar submission this year - is a quirky and enjoyable tale of self-discovery so long as you’re willing to take it on its own terms and see things from Mercedes’ perspective.