En el Ombligo del Cielo

An aristocratic woman is shipwrecked on an island with a lower class suitor she disdains, until their close proximity forces a closeness between them. The story is as old as Cecil B. DeMille’s 1919 Male And Female, starring Gloria Swanson (and even older than that; DeMille’s movie is based on the 1902 play, The Admirable Crichton, by J. M. Barrie). Carlos Oliver’s low-key comedy En el Ombligo del Cielo (In the Middle of Heaven) updates the story to a high rise corporate office building, but the premise is the same.

In del Cielo, shot in Mexico City, Distrito Federal for approximately $400,000, Andrea (Magali Boysselle) is a high-strung, highly stressed advertising executive. In competition with a co-worker for an airline advertising package, she has one weekend to finish her proposal and present it on Monday morning. To make matters worse, she’s just had a falling-out with her assistant, Paty (Montserrat de León), a childhood friend.

After going to the roof of the high rise after office hours to dry a blouse she spilled salsa on, Andrea inadvertently closes and locks the only door to the roof, stranding her with a janitor, Gualberto (Noé Hernández), she’s barely noticed before. Unable to call her boyfriend with a battery-drained cell phone, and too high up to be heard by passersby, Andrea and Gualberto have to survive together for the weekend on little food, with Andrea’s deadline ever looming.

Boysselle and Hernández are both longtime veterans of TV and film, and their characters are inherently likable. Boysselle can portray both fierce frustration and vulnerability and Hernández, who for much of his career played hard-edged criminals, here has a roguish, benevolent charm.

Getting stranded for the weekend is the best thing that could have happened to Andrea, who desperately needs downtime, and Gualberto makes the best of the situation, calling Andrea “Ma’am” and providing what little food he has stored. The inevitable happens as Andrea lets down her emotional guard. Del Cielo does surprise in that a romantic relationship between the two is only held out as a possibility, after the film ends. En el Ombligo del Cielo is, ultimately, a “feel good” movie, but one that avoids the sickly Hallmark vibe it would have had if made in the states.

Alebrije Home Entertainment’s DVD presentation, though, is problematic. The English subtitles appearing on screen are timed so poorly with the words being said that it’s often difficult to know who’s saying what. The translated title of the film printed on the DVD box is “In the Middle of Heaven,”but the subtitled translation on screen is, improbably, “In the Navel of the Sky”. The DVD does have a director’s commentary track and trailers for other promising Mexican films being distributed in the states by Alebrije.

—Michael R. Neno, 2018 Sep 2