Plaza Catedral (dir. Abner Benaim), 2021

Chief parks cars for a living. Alicia sells luxury high rise condos sprinkling the skyline of Panama City. Plaza Catedral, the Panamanian submission to the Academy Awards’ International Film category, follows the brief intersection of their lives at the titular, historic Plaza Catedral. The film has promise and moments of directorial flair, but suffers from an inconsistent script and narrative. In the end, Plaza Catedral works best when following Alicia, a Mexican immigrant mourning the loss of her son and dissolution of her marriage, as a character study. And, Ilse Salas does formidable work and some heavy lifting to create authentic moments from forced or questionably believable dialogue and plot devices.

Alicia is moving from her luxury highrise, and her inexplicably cold ex-husband, to an equally ritzy apartment on Plaza Catedral. Chief, a teenage nuisance who tasks himself with taking care of her car, seeks her out one night after being shot. While at first attempting to avoid the situation, merely dropping Chief off at a hospital, he returns after a brief treatment in fear the police would arrest him. Alicia offers him a safe haven, at least until he heals, much to the dismay of those around her. “The younger they are the more dangerous,” her doctor warns her. “Promise me you won’t take him in.” Plaza Catedral occasionally dips into the narrative of the two sides of Panama City: the hustle and danger of certain neighborhoods and the wealth and glamor of others. Whereas, it would have been interesting to witness how Alicia’s acts as a good samaritan delivers the realities she is privileged enough to ignore to her posh, upper-class existence, the narrative instead has her choosing to seek out this danger.

Plaza Catedral largely suffers from an uneven script, which has a solid foundation but an often-time rushed or forced execution. Character decisions at times feel inauthentic, more designed to move the film in a certain direction. As said, Salas overcomes some of the scripts lacking, such as her emotional recounting of her son's (hard-to-believe) accidental death. Killed by loose electrical wires and a puddle of water, Alicia feels guilt over not rushing to his aid and, instead, walking over unsure of what was happening. And with this, is one of my favorite directorial choices of the film: when Alicia re-envisions how she reacted and, over and over again, thinks of how she could have reacted differently. The scene is shot consecutively and, for the first two or three, you may not even realize a difference in reaction until her despair and speed accelerates. Moments of such directorial brilliance, however, are countered with less brilliant dream sequences meant to feel real-life, but never are effectively realistic.

As only his second fictional narrative, and first in over a decade, it feels as though Abner Benaim has potential to make excellent fictional stories with forthcoming films. Plaza Catedral shows great promise, style, and perspective hampered by a second-draft script. Whereas the first three-quarters of the film moves as a slow-burn character-study, the last quarter feels like a rushed crime-drama with little to tie both together. After Chief steals money and flees her home, Alicia searches for him among the more dangerous neighborhoods he calls home. There she comes in contact with his real life and learns his truths and his lies. While there were few strong narrative moments in the final quarter, they never amounted to much with a rushed ending scene. “How far would you go to help a stranger?” is the tagline to Plaza Catedral, which has different connotations between the two films in place. I much prefer the character-study and wish that narrative had continued, either bringing the harsh realities of Chief’s life to Alicia’s doorstep or letting his disappearance challenge how Alicia approaches her own life and privileged surroundings.

Rating: 6/10