Film Review: LEONOR WILL NEVER DIE: Retired Successful Screenwriter Lives Last Creation to the Max [Sundance 2022]

Leonor Will Never Die Review

Leonor Will Never Die (2021) Film Review from the 45th Annual Sundance Film Festival, a movie directed by Martika Ramirez Escobar, starring Sheila Francisco, Bong Cabrera, Rocky Salumbides, and Anthony Falcone.

This film has the remarkable distinction of seamless overlapping narratives that neither muddles  nor fragments any of them.

Sheila Francisco, under the guidance of writer/director Martika Ramirez Escobar, portrays Leonor in what can only be adequately described as an awesome performance. Leonor is a workaday matron who couldn’t look less like a successful (albeit retired) screenwriter if she tried, writing in a genre that belies her faded flower print smock: action films in the style of Jackie Chan. Her reputation certainly hasn’t faded, however, at least enough for her live-in son to name-drop and thus keep the electricity turned on for at least one more day. And about one more day is all they get–soon they’re living by candlelight.

No problem for Leonor, though. Hoping to win a screenwriting contest advertised in a newspaper, she answers the call of inspiration, clacking away at an old manual Smith-Corona on an unfinished work penned early in her career: a pot-boiler in which a noble young man finds the courage to avenge the murder of his brother.

In truth, Leonor did in fact have the money for bills, but she’s far too busy for banal activities. She wanders around, witnessing the imaginary world of her new screenplay. She uses the earmarked money to buy cheap street copies of action films for a ten-year-old she befriended. She talks to the ghost (or the hallucination–take your pick) of the son who was shot on the set of one of her movies when a prop gun turned out to be tragically real.

By pure chance (if chance it was), she was struck in the head by a television tossed out the window by an enraged huckster. At this point the film plunges headlong into the surreal as Leonor, bleeding from her head wound, continues her wandering in what appears to be the fleshed-out world of her latest creation, surrounded by the staginess of those determined to help her.

Then a turnabout ensues with Leonor on a gurney, evidently comatose. While her celebrity gets a sudden boost, the audience is still privy to her internal world, where the characters, heroes and villains alike, are at first puzzled, then astounded by Leonor’s knowledge of their private lives, even knowing what they’ll say next.

It may seem obvious at first that this is merely a dream-state brought on by her injury, but don’t be too sure. The “real world” alternate has its own surreal components. For example, a pregnant man gives a bedside television interview, his own mother in attendance, absurdly proud, informing the TV audience that she first ascribed her son’s swollen belly to flatulence. More bizarre still is that the surrounding hospital staff evidently took this as a perfectly logical explanation. Later, the local police soberly watch Leonor’s son reenact her injury with the very same television that bonked her on the head but somehow ended up mounted in the hospital waiting room.

In the midst of all the hullabaloo to and fro, Leonor’s subconscious is hard at work, reenacting different versions of the same scene, trying some, discarding others, the plot finally reconciled. At this point, the entire ‘cast’ launches in perfect step into a sort of roundelay pop song-and-dance number in the various locations, Leonor herself leading the charge throughout with a huge grin on her face.

Despite all its wackiness, Leonor Will Never Die is much more than an excellent hybrid farce. This remarkable work explores existential themes that are both personal and professional, and how tightly the two intertwine. In retrospect one can appreciate how the creative drive can flourish even in poverty and revive one’s craft and artistry. It is not so much that Leonor herself will never die, but that the essence of her creativity and imagination remains alive and kicking, irrespective of her state of mind.

Rating: 9/10

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