REVIEW: ‘Away From Meaning,’ now available from Cinema Tropical
Photo: Away From Meaning, directed by Olivia Luengas, is now available to rent or buy from Cinema Tropical. Photo courtesy of Cinema Tropical / Provided with permission.
On its surface, the documentary Away From Meaning is simple and subtle, but dive a bit deeper into this narrative, and many unexpected and profound considerations materialize. The film, directed by Olivia Luengas, follows the filmmaker’s sister, Liliana, who suffered from viral encephalitis at the age of 3 and now experiences borderline personality disorder as an adult.
The film follows Liliana as she lives her life, often overcoming obstacles and trying her best to process and understand what it means to endure and thrive with this disorder. Helping her on her journey is a friend, Carlos, one of the few people in Liliana’s life that can comprehend and genuinely identify with her life and struggles.
After spending 88 minutes with Liliana, it becomes evident that she’s a dynamic woman who is trying to live the best life she can, but she also has many mountains to climb — and sometimes her thoughts turn toward suicide. The audience is able to get closer to her by not only watching her walk and drive around her hometown in Mexico, but also hearing her carefully chosen words and powerful thoughts via a helpful and revealing narration. A spoken inner-monologue is a bit of a risk for a documentary because sometimes, when not handled correctly, it comes off as a narrative shortcut and cheap means of moving the story along. Not so with Away From Meaning; Liliana’s words offer the viewer a chance to go deeper and understand what might not be easily conveyed in the visual form.
In particular, Liliana shares profound thoughts about normalcy and how the external world deals with her mental illness. This sets up a wonderful dichotomy in the feature film: on one end, there’s the portrait of a woman living her life and trying to manage her borderline personality disorder, and on the other end is a running commentary on how that lived life is perceived by others.
Away From Meaning, which is now available to rent or buy from Cinema Tropical, is an intimate profile of a woman, her close friend, and how the two build their relationship and recognize their shared journeys of living with a mental illness. Ultimately, the film is about humanity and the need for society to reassess its definitions of normalcy, mental illness and acceptance.
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
Away From Meaning (2018). Directed by Olivia Luengas. In Spanish with English subtitles. Running time: 88 minutes. Rating: 
