- Jennifer Connelly (left) in Aloft
Though it’s in English and stars internationally celebrated actors Jennifer Connelly, Cillian Murphy, and Mélanie Laurent, Claudia Llosa’s Aloft—which plays at the River East 21 for another two nights—feels remarkably similar to the writer-director’s previous features, Madeinusa (2006) and The Milk of Sorrow (2009), which were made in Peru with nonprofessional casts. In Aloft, a single mother (Connelly) seeks out a nomadic faith healer in hopes of curing her terminally ill son and, in the process, discovers she possesses magic healing powers herself. Llosa presents the faith-healing business matter-of-factly, but adopts a wonder-struck perspective toward the film’s settings, which comprise some rural communities in northwestern Canada and a makeshift settlement around the Arctic Circle. The fantastical elements seem to emerge naturally from these locations, as in Llosa’s other films or in much South American magic realist literature. This sort of thing is rare in English-language movies, and I’m impressed that Llosa managed to pull it off. Rather than “going Hollywood,” she made what’s effectively a Peruvian movie in North America—something that few, if any, other filmmakers have done.
So it goes in Aloft, which does for Canada’s snowy tundras what Llosa’s other films do for the Andes. Again, the characters are working through unspeakable suffering. For most of the time she’s onscreen Connelly’s character is wrestling with the knowledge that her school-age son will most likely die young. In flash-forwards set 20 years later, Murphy plays Connelly’s other son, who’s still angry at his mother for abandoning him as a boy to become a wandering healer. His journey to meet her at the Arctic Circle (a mission spearheaded by an investigative journalist played by Laurent) feels like something out of a folktale—his story feels increasingly out of time the further he gets from modern society. Adding to the folkloric vibe, Murphy goes everywhere with a pet falcon that serves as a sort of spirit animal.
