‘On Behalf of My Son’ San Sebastián Review: A Grieving Mother’s Quiet Pilgrimage Through Guilt And Grace

There’s something here that recalls Italian neorealism and Iranian cinema — traces that surface throughout On Behalf of My Son, the new film from Brazilian director Gabriel Martins (Mars One), which is competing in San Sebastián and will represent Brazil at the Goya Awards. It’s a film whose calm, measured staging — built on unhurried, deliberate movements — disguises a ferocious internal tragedy. And it’s a film whose dramatic arc might look circular, even monotonous, but one that gradually reveals not so much unknown sides of its central character as of the world surrounding her.

Vicentina (a superb, restrained performance by Rejanie Faria) is an elderly woman with mobility problems, whom we meet right after the film’s first, jolting scene: a bus plunging off a bridge and crashing upside down onto a highway below. It’s a violent shock that rattles everyone — including the audience, still settling into their seats after a placid opening built around a lovely song — and it soon reaches the old woman at home. Because Vicentina is the mother of Wesley, the driver of the bus that went over the edge. He’s dead, and the crash he caused killed dozens of others.

After absorbing the terrible news, burying her son, and receiving a visit from another son who lives elsewhere, Vicentina wants to understand more about what actually happened. Was this a tragedy with no one to blame? Or did her own son slip up at some point? Watching the television coverage and the erratic way the bus swerved and fell, she begins to suspect her son may have tried to take his own life, taking everyone aboard down with him. Or maybe, as others suggest, there’s some supernatural explanation.

What’s certain is that Vicentina, true to the film’s original title (Vicentina Pede Desculpas), decides to apologize. She tracks down the names and phone numbers of the victims’ relatives and starts calling them, one by one, to say she’s sorry for whatever might have happened. There’s no calculation in it, and reaching out to the other victims’ families doesn’t mean she’s decided her son did something wrong — but she feels guilty, responsible, or simply feels she has to do something to quiet her own anguish. The film builds itself around these encounters — and non-encounters — with the victims’ relatives, meetings that gradually expose different situations, personalities, and ways of processing what happened and what Vicentina is doing about it. Those meetings function as a kind of urban pilgrimage that ends up transforming the woman making it.

Martins loads the entire dramatic weight of the film onto Faria’s shoulders — a grief-stricken mother who has to carry both the pain of losing her son and the responsibility she feels toward everyone else affected by what he did. In her encounters with relatives and acquaintances, she starts to wonder whether she failed as a mother, whether she didn’t talk to her son enough, whether something was going on with him that she never noticed. But no one confirms her theory. The few people who knew Wesley that she crosses paths with — a thrash-metal singer is about as close to a friend as we ever see, along with a couple of coworkers from the bus company — all suggest there was nothing unusual about him.

Over nearly 150 minutes — which could stand to be trimmed somewhat, though the film flows with a fairly harmonious rhythm regardless — On Behalf of My Son weaves a social tapestry that situates its protagonist within a working-class world, surrounded by people in situations similar to her own who are, for the most part, sympathetic to what she’s going through. Many don’t understand why she’s apologizing, and several refuse to even take her call, but the narrative device works as a way into the world around the protagonist, showing how grief ripples outward to touch everyone connected to the tragedy.

The film shares a certain family resemblance with the work of André Novais de Oliveira — one of its co-producers, and a filmmaker whose work Martins has edited — and with a good part of Belo Horizonte’s film scene more broadly, connected not just by locations and landscapes but by a shared closeness to classic humanist realism. It’s a film of uncomfortable conversations, bus rides, waiting, glances, silences, and journeys that slowly map out a geography of pain — one that, with a few exceptions, connects its points in an empathetic, generous way. For better or worse, this noble and moving film seems to suggest, one person’s fate is everyone’s fate.