A Family's Financial Crisis Breeds Comedy in Artist Amalia Ulman's 'El Planeta'
Photography Roeg Cohen
My therapist recently described a certain sect of my family as stuck in an inner drama of excess and deprivation, ricocheting between poles of queasy abundance and harrowing lack. I would describe my family life more as a comedy, but I wrote it down in my notebook anyway. Then, a few days later, I saw Amalia Ulman’s debut film, El Planeta, a self-described “dark comedy about eviction” and, again, I found myself writing down: Excess! Deprivation! It is a film about a mother and daughter, Maria and Leonor, brilliantly played by Ulman’s mother, Ale Ulman, and Ulman herself, as they navigate unexpected poverty after the death of Leonor’s father. Their financial crisis swells and crests, like a wave—they struggle to afford food, their electricity is turned off, they await their impending eviction—but the pair remain attached to the pleasures of their previous life, running various scams and hijinks to maintain the appearance of their former class position.
Maria clutches her fur coat tightly around her neck, pulls at the handle of her Burberry bag, as if the bag was a door, as if it could open and lead her somewhere. Leonor incessantly orders things online, reads Spring and All by William Carlos Williams under the lights of the hallway, decorates her room with a t-shirt that says, “I Need An Inner Child Abortion.” Ulman situates Leonor in “current economies where influencers might get sent expensive clothing from luxury brands that they have to sell on The RealReal to buy groceries,” a cycle of too much and not enough. Magical thinking is strewn across the surface of their lives; their fridge is empty except for the names of their enemies, written on small strips of frozen paper, flimsy curses. They go to the department store and shop, lit up like the fluorescent rooms they wander through, returning everything in two weeks. They do not have jobs, traditionally speaking. Their small apartment is a shrine to their mysteriously absent cat: crazy cat ladies with no cat to be crazy about; the space is suffused with oddness and grief. They eat feasts of free pastries. They charge fancy restaurant meals to a local politician’s account, pretending Leonor is his girlfriend. Care emerges at the family’s center: it is slowly revealed that Leonor is disabled after a bus accident years before, with chronic pain and limited mobility in her legs. Glinting with a bright wit and scrappy intimacy, the film is a portrait of two women whose commitment to fantasy and each other eclipses the impossibilities they inhabit. At times, it feels like their force of wish might actually succeed.
Ulman, born in 1989, wrote, directed, produced, and stars in El Planeta, which premiered digitally at the 2021 Sundance Film Festival. Set in her hometown of Gijón, in Asturias, Spain, and with the casting of her own mother alongside herself, “there are definitely autobiographical aspects in the film, like the disability and the eviction,” says Ulman. Just as the plot draws something from her life, the visual style draws from her work: “The pastries, the 1-Euro store decor, the transitions, etc., are direct references to my artworks.”
Prior to this film, Ulman’s artistic practice also presented similar slippages between truth and fiction. She is known particularly for “Excellences & Perfections” (2014), in which Ulman constructed and performed a scripted version of herself on Instagram. In squares, a girl was built, who embodied various clichés of online femininity and mirrored erotics: a fictional boob job, with dusky shots of her bandaged chest, plates of halved avocados, high ponies and thigh gaps, pastel slogan tees, baroque lingerie, tilted chins. Clearly, this is another kind of storytelling, but like so many performances of wealth and girlhood, it was often interpreted as a kind of lie, or scam, as many struggled to distinguish between Ulman the artist and Ulman within the art object. Can we consider the scammer as a kind of author, or artist? When I ask Ulman if she has any favorite real-life scammers, she responds, “The stories about scammers that I find most endearing are those by clumsy criminals, which usually end up badly, because they are too honest.”
Leonor is a stylist who can only style herself, unable to fly to jobs that only pay in exposure. This tautological loop of gig economies runs parallel to Maria, as a houseless housewife. The mother of all scams, of course, was always global capitalism. The fashion in the movie includes some of the most articulate outfits I’ve seen recently, cleanly expressing so much about the characters’ joys, precarities, and identifications. “Styling [Maria] was much easier because right wingers in Spain who dress ‘posh’ wear a uniform that hasn’t changed for decades. Leonor’s character was more of a back-and-forth that I was able to construct with the help of Fiona Duncan. I think it was very important to show that Leonor, if she were given the chance (a paid gig instead of mere exposure), could do well in her field,” says Ulman. Leonor is decked out in a roster of young New York designers, like Lou Dallas, Gauntlett Cheng, Veja, Women’s History Museum, and Martina Cox. Maria is almost always in pajamas, cloaked in a blanket to keep warm, with a spa headband in a cartoonish bow. When she leaves the house, she puts on her rich-person disguise: fur, bag, sunglasses.
When I ask about the missing cat, who is mourned so much more deeply than the dead dad, Ulman explains, “El Planeta is a family endeavor, and Holga (the cat) has been a very crucial part of our family structure for the past 15 years...I don’t think it was intentional, but clearly, the roles of other women and animals in the film are more relevant than those of men, who are peripheral and only instrumental to their survival.” When I wrote down excess and deprivation, I meant it in a material sense. I was thinking about money. But I realize the film is also about what it means to love too much and not enough, the way care seamlessly flows between people unless it is disrupted, diverted by barriers of class hierarchy, exploitation, and suffering. Otherwise, love could keep moving in circles, around and around, with no goal but heightened focus, like two women walking together, window shopping.
