Possible Lives (Las Vidas Posibles)

As a geologist, Clara’s husband Luciano often travels to Patagonia for work. After calling Clara from the road, he stops answering his cell phone. Once she’s confirmed that he failed to check into his hotel, Clara leaves a note and sets out to find him. Thousands of miles from home, she checks into the room herself. She meets with a police inspector and asks for help finding her husband. “When the weather improves,” he assures her, noting that in such inclement conditions, there are many accidents.

While biding her time in the middle of nowhere, Clara meets a real estate agent who bears a striking resemblance to her missing spouse. She feigns interest in buying property to spend time with him, despite the fact that he has a wife. She prowls around his house at night. She asks awkward questions about his personal life and, eventually, she even ignores information from the police about her husband’s actual disappearance.

Possible Lives, a sleepy eighty-minute film in Spanish with English subtitles, is an interesting concept but lacks suspense. Though pretty, it isn’t terribly eventful. Without much time to learn about the characters’ relationships, it’s difficult to feel connected to their problems, to Clara’s fright and grief; yet it’s always quite easy to discern what is happening in what could be an elegant mystery about losing one’s mind and losing one’s partner. It’s a perfectly fine film to catch along with a series of other during a festival showcase, but you shouldn’t rent it expecting a riotously entertaining drama.

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