Soledad

The first visual that the viewer encounters in Soledad pronounces a sense of distance - two characters at the extreme ends of a frame divided by a wall, as they go about performing their respective tasks in adjacent rooms. Despite the brightness and the presence of daylight flooding the house, the ringing of the phone, the first real sound to break the oppressive silence, carries an elemental eeriness with it.

As events begin to progress, the viewer begins to wonder if the woman, Soledad, wasn't supposed to answer the phone in the first place, was it someone who would have only revealed their identity to her husband, if yes indeed, why so? While the viewer might push these questions aside as paranoia by association with a seemingly lonely character who is too docile to question it, can our protagonist herself do that?

Once left by herself and unable to make too much sense of the strange place that New York can often turn out to be, the young, pregnant bride has found herself in, Soledad calls a relative. The first proper exchange of dialogue now takes place, informing the viewer of several undercurrents whose presence had merely been implied so far. As the film finally concludes, there is a clear suggestion of a life of loneliness that awaits the protagonist, a seamstress, with only her sewing machine as a potential companion. Moments that could have been marked by intimacy, are instead warped by indifference and coolness, foiling the girl's expectations of any kind of warmth by the sole person she knows in New York after having left her former life behind in Dominican Republic.

In its brief length, marked by few dialogues, the film manages to engage with all of this and more. It could have, however, benefited from a little more stability and balance in its visuals and frames.