This first feature from Paraguayan director Marcelo Martinessi is a delicate study in confinement, and of how the chance of freedom can bring an equal sense of exhilaration and apprehension. The two heroines of The Heiresses, Chela (Ana Brun) and Chiquita (Margarita Irún), are longterm lovers who inhabit an environment of familiar privilege and comfortable claustrophobia. When confronted by new circumstances that disrupt their long-established private world, the former faces an opportunity for change that may look set to break her, but actually has the potential to make her anew.

The couple live in a spacious but heavily gloomy Asunción villa, Chela’s family home, in an old-style district of the Paraguayan capital. Their life of leisure, defined by a group of women friends in similar positions (men are almost completely absent from this world) and by the maid who looks after them, seems as elaborately ordered as the bedside tray that has to be carefully laid out for Chela every morning. It seems like a timeless hangover from a previous age but the couple has fallen into debt – Martinessi’s script never elucidates how or why – and their world is in jeopardy.

Their new circumstances are forcing them to sell off some of their most precious possessions, a procedure that is carried out with strict decorum, purchasers shown around by the maid while Chela watches from behind a screen. Much more dramatic, however, is Chiquita's imminent confinement to prison on charges of fraud (pictured below, Margarita Irún) . One of the film’s strongest elements is its establishment of character, defining the more extrovert Chiquita as the dominant force in the relationship, her forthrightness set against the apprehension and reticence of her companion.The reaction of the two women to the prison environment is characteristic, its noisy unruliness a world in which Chiquita quickly finds herself at ease, while it clearly intimidates Chela even more than having to drive herself there (in an ancient Mercedes that is another family hand-down). Despite the attentions of a well-meaning friend who is trying to have Chiquita released, the already limited boundaries of Chela’s world look set for further contraction.   

That’s until a neighbour, the mordantly bitchy Pituca (María Martins), accosts her with a request – more a command, actually – to be driven to her bridge party; Chela complies, and uncharacteristically accepts the money offered for the ride. Soon she has become an informal taxi-driver to a whole gaggle of acerbic middle-aged ladies: any judgment of the privileged self-centredness of their world that Martinessi may evince is moderated by his relish of their eccentricity.

When Chela makes the acquaintance of the younger Angy (Ana Ivanova), the daughter of one of this coterie, her horizons start to be stretched – literally so, when she agrees to drive her regularly to a more distant destination – and a subtle transformation begins as she is drawn out of herself, starting to pay to herself in new ways. It’s affecting, and a performance of rare accomplishment from Brun (in her first screen appearance after a career in theatre) for which she won the Berlinale’s Best Actress award this year.

It may seem a rather hermetic drama played out on a small scale, but the resonances of The Heiresses surely run deeper, not least for a society that is itself emerging from decades of repression. Martinessi doesn’t need to stress such aspects, however, just as he doesn’t need to labour the gay element in his film, or indeed emphasise the aspects of class that so clearly underlie the world that he depicts. His accomplishment is to create this particularl world in minute totality, with an apparent ease that belies the scale of the achievement. His cinematic horizons can only broaden after this, in every sense: defintely a director to watch. 

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There’s a lovely feel of folk freedom to Carlos Marques-Marcet’s second film, which sees the Spanish writer-director setting up creative shop resoundingly in London – or rather, on the waters of the city’s canals that provide the backdrop for Anchor & Hope. It’s there right from the film’s opening song “Dirty Old Town”, in the Ewan MacColl original, rather than the better-known, and far grittier Pogues version: these London waterscapes are lived-in and naturalistic but they’re also photogenic (and beautifully shot by Dagmar Weaver-Madsen).

The gist of the action is nicely caught in MacColl’s line “Dreamed a dream by the old canal”, except that the film’s lead couple, Eva (Oona Chaplin) and Kat (Natalia Tena), are actually living on that waterway. Home is a canal boat, which they steer up and down the banks of North and East London with unhurried freedom: it’s the perfect backdrop for the world they have created for themselves, one defined by their independence – both have on-off jobs, but employment seems hardly a priority – and passion (an early scene makes clear that their sexual spark is very much alight). We never learn how or when they got together, except that Kat is Spanish, although that's a detail you would hardly notice (except in pondering whether it represents the sort of pre-Brexit idyll that we may shortly come to miss rather desperately?).

But the almost unspoken security of their relationship will be tested, a process indirectly set off by the death of their cat, the kind of seemingly unlikely association that actually rings very true to life here. The feline funeral, complete with Buddhist rites administered by Eva’s mother Germaine (played by Geraldine Chaplin, her mother in real  life, who has a whale of a time with a role that is both memorably batty and attractively rich-hearted). The film’s opening chapter title may read “We can get another cat”, but Eva’s realisation that she wants her children (a subject so far apparently unmentioned between the two) to know her mother before it’s too late pushes a more immediate issue to the fore.

Kat is underwhelmed by the prospect of parenthood, even when the perfect candidate for surrogate father turns up in the shape of her visiting Barcelona friend Roger (David Verdaguer), a happy-go-lucky bohemian who takes to the idea, initially raised at a tequila-fuelled get-together, with enthusiasm, and then a more unexpected degree of emotional commitment. Marques-Marcet and Jules Nurrish’s script enjoys its comedy – often of quite a loopy kind, into which Verdaguer fits especially well – but hits home when charting the fluctuations of feeling that engross the uneasily expectant trio.

The canal world offers a quietly revelatory pleasure in itself

The immediate reference of Anchor & Hope’s title may be the waterside pub where Kat works part-time, but its associations run deeper, surely alluding to the kinds of secure foundations that allow planning for the future (or not...). Does parenthood bring responsibilities that preclude the kind of impromptu lifestyle that the two women have so obviously enjoyed to date, based on the (relative) impermanence of their canal lifestyle? The film’s closing scenes, as well as its Spanish title Tierra firme, suggest that such ideas are somewhere in Marques-Marcet’s mind.

But his film wears any such seriousness lightly, delighting instead in the emotional dynamics of day-to-day life. (Didn’t Michael Winterbottom, many moons ago, use to explore somewhat similar territory?). Even when the temperature of the film’s bondings chillis, its seasonal setting seems to remain summer. The film's ending is left as fluid as the waters that flow through it – there's a degree of meandering, too, on the length front – while the canal world offers a quietly revelatory pleasure in itself (the Film Offices of the NE and E boroughs must be happy). Marques-Marcet keeps his soundtrack largely diagetic, its sparsity broken only by some lovely Molly Drake folk tunes that add a delicate melancholy. Anchor & Hope has much that charms, and it's good to find a film that treats viewers as grown-ups.

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You have to turn to the brief interview with director Anne Fontaine that is the sole extra on this DVD release to discover the real source of her film Reinventing Marvin. Though Fontaine and Pierre Trividic’s screenplay is credited as original, it draws heavily – Fontaine calls it a “free interpretation” – on Edouard Louis’s bestselling 2014 autobiographical novel The End of Eddy, which told the story of his growing up in the French provinces in an environment profoundly hostile to his emerging gay identity.

It’s an undeniably powerful picture of a youthful outsider, one for whom lack of understanding at home, in an unsympathetic working-class family, proved almost as cruel as the school bullying that his sexuality evoked. But Louis offered no clue as to how he came to escape a world that could so easily have trapped him, no suggestion of the process – and, crucially, who helped along the way – that saw him evolve into who he is today, with a confidence that was able to overcome such beginnings. In other words, just how the “reinvention” alluded to in the film’s title actually took place.Fontaine has filled in that gap by positing an imagined concept that the Louis figure, here named Marvin Bijou – the awkwardness of that surname, translated as “Jewels”, seems horribly ironic for a context that is anything but sparkling – found his path out of that desolate early milieu through theatre. Early encouragement from a sympathetic schoolteacher is fortuitously followed by engagement with an intuitive stage director-coach, who draws Marvin both out of himself and into the Parisian gay scene. Never entirely losing his shyness, his involvement in that culture grows, encouraged by a largely benevolent sugar daddy figure who moves in circles of which the youth could once barely have dreamed.

With the film’s action framed by the young man’s development of his life story into a stage script, this unlikely dream narrative is completed by acquaintance with Isabelle Huppert, no less, who plays herself (pictured above, Huppert with Finnegan Oldfield). What else remains but to put on a show with her that will bring him fame, as well as a chance to revisit, and in some way make peace with, those childhood roots? There’s barely a cliché of the well-trodden “self-realisation through art” formula left untouched, with the gradual childhood absorption of the young Marvin (an absolutely winning performance from Jules Porier, main picture) in the challenges of his chosen artistic path familiar from the likes of Billy Elliot.

Huppert plays beneficent with her customary aplomb

But Fontaine's story seems somehow to predicate the world of her grown-up protagonist; he later changes his name to Martin, adopting the surname of that first supportive teacher, too. Finnegan Oldfield is undeniably attractive in that role, but aesthetic engagement comes to dominate over emotional involvement as the story progresses. Fontaine talks of needing to find actors who could “fit with each other”, and there is indeed an almost uncanny echo between the shape of their faces, especially evident in a shyness around the mouth, of the two; she cast Oldfield first, but the essential presence here is surely Porier, who brings an absolute, open-eyed freshness – one that can be almost agonising to witness – to the world that he negotiates with such difficulty. Reinventing Marvin hits home when dealing with the pain and awkwardness of its early scenes, far more than the mannered direction, rather overstretched at 115 minutes, which it takes later en route to a rather portentous finale.

It may be a story about a kind of redemption, but those childhood scenes remain more memorable, albeit in an almost gruesome way, than anything that follows. Gregory Gadebois is tremendous as Marvin’s indolent, overweight father, who oversees his hapless prolo household with alcoholic brusquerie, a characterisation that leaves us to question the film’s suggested resolutions. Vincent Macaigne, attractively sympathetic as the youth's drama teacher Abel, is never more convincing than when he’s disabusing his moping protégé about the lasting interest of his incarnation as “tormented working-class fag”. Huppert plays beneficent with her customary aplomb, even as we wonder whether she would be moving in these circles in the first place.

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Overleaf: watch the trailer for Reinventing Marvin