“Being a mother won’t save you from anything,” Mitchie (Paulina Garcia) confesses to Ana Maria (Jenny Navarrete) in “Lovely Orbit” during a rare moment of clarity, as she shifts attention away from her health as she slowly succumbs to dementia. The two meet over the precarious immigration status of Ana Maria, Mitchie’s pregnant caregiver who needs a steady job to stay in Panama after leaving her home in Colombia three years ago. The nurse thinks the baby might help if the paperwork isn’t served. But in director Ana Endara’s emotional drama, her characters find a safe haven where they least expect it.
“The Beloved Orbit” begins with a relatively modest offer from Mitchie’s daughter, Jimena (Juliet Roy), to Ana Maria: $140 a week for an eight-hour-a-day job, with the added incentive that if it works out, her lawyer will take care of her immigration status. Ana Maria never seems too desperate to accept, but she turns in the paperwork whenever she can, and her anxiety begins to show in her growing belly, which is almost immediately revealed to be fake. An unexpected bonus, however, comes when her sixteen years of caring for the elderly lead Mitchie to grow closer to her after previous caregivers have been unsuccessful. The self-made businesswoman operates in a different reality, not only because of her deteriorating mental state, but also because of the fact that wealth has been protecting her.
It is her deteriorating condition rather than the genuine bond they form that prompts Jimena to offer Ana Maria a full-time job, an indication of the kind of relationship Mitchie has with her children, who have used her wealth to distance themselves from her, leaving an empty house alongside her maid, Cristina. Although the story of the caregiver who melts the heart of an angry elderly person has practically become its own genre by now, Endara and co-writer Pilar Moreno find it a compelling launching pad for exploring the dynamics of a relationship that is neither quite maternal nor even particularly friendly, but still deeply meaningful. Mitchie could end up providing as much comfort to Ana Maria as she receives when they both feel drifting apart from their blood relatives. Of course, this only comes after Ana Maria has been tested by Mitchie, who is increasingly prone to losing her train of thought, but still retains her wits.
Garcia and Navarrete both give beautiful performances that keep the film from feeling heavy, though Endara’s commitment to something more ambitious than just seeing Mitchie and Ana Maria connect can occasionally lead to some irrelevant threads. While it makes sense for Ana Maria to go through the motions of pretending to be pregnant for the sake of appearances, her solitary visits to the maternity clinic where chatting with other patients inevitably reveals ideas about parenting start to feel awkward in service of a central idea rather than the story, and they feel even more out of shape when Endara generally finds graceful ways to get into her characters’ heads and conjure up the world around them. At times, “Beloved Tropic” sends Ana Maria back to her Colombian past with just the sound of the ocean and presents Mitchie’s deterioration in the expressions of others who remember how she used to be, leaning away from drama in favor of the calm its characters begin to find in each other. When peace of mind seems so elusive to them, Endara’s ability to deliver such a feeling to the audience is especially rewarding.
