En la puta vida (2001, Uruguay)

In Montevideo Elisa Sanchez, 27, (Mariana Santangelo) has an argument with her mother, with who she is living with her two children, apparently fathered by two different men. She works for a market trader but later that day has a row with him and walks out of that job too.

Now homeless and jobless, she decides that the answer is to open a hairdressing salon, but she finds that she can't afford the rent of the premises. Commiserating with her friend Loulou, she goes to, and for a while works in the brothel where Loulou earns her income, hoping she can raise enough money to start the hairdressing business. The rules are explained to her by an aging transvestite madam.

Inevitably she gets exploited at the brothel, but she also falls in love with a pimp, Placido (Silvestre) and when he suggests that they visit Barcelona, she agrees. Trying to earn money there as a prostitute, where it emerges that Placido runs a string of prostitutes in Spain as well as in Uruguay, she gets involved in arguments about who is entitled to solicit on which particular part of the street, and the Brazilian transvestites are particularly argumentative on the point; in a scuffle one night Placido shoots and kills one of them. While Elisa is dumping the gun for him, she sees that he has been arrested.

She meets a policeman and does a deal with him, whereby she informs on all the rackets in the street, and he releases Placido. This sequence wasn't all that convincing, as a police photographer takes pictures of the prostitutes as if that was somehow "evidence" that the police couldn't otherwise obtain.

So life goes on, and Elisa wants Placido to marry her, but Placido isn't going to go for that, and instead he is stealing all their earnings. Elisa starts to hide away her money. One night she is out and comes across an accident in the street - her friend Loulou has been killed. Elisa sees that her life has no future, and in any case the immigration authorities are closing in, and she has heard that the two children (whom she left behind in Uruguay) have been put into an orphanage. The final section of the film is frankly unbelievable, as the director hastens towards a "lived happily ever after" ending.

Nonetheless this is a good and entertaining film, not at all as tawdry as the plot strapline might suggest; and Mariana Santangelo puts up a good performance as the doughty and intelligent heroine.

The title has been rendered in English as In This Tricky Life, but the Spanish words are more forceful than that: "Bloody Life" might be better. There is also a pun in the title: "puta" means "bloody" (in the sense of wretched, awful) but it also means "prostitute".

Recommended film; HF April 2007

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