Memories of a Burning Body review – tenderly conceived docudrama about the enduring sexuality of women

Costa Rican film-maker Antonella Sudasassi Furniss has curated a docudrama distilled from the experiences of three women in their 60s and 70s, who speak (off camera, anonymously) with wit and warmth about their enduring sexuality; an older person’s sexuality that modernity primly refuses to recognise, just as patriarchal authorities denied and repressed them as sexual beings in their youth.

Furniss also creates three phases of the same composite character: the older woman (Sol Carballo), a widow who has a happy and sensual relationship with a man; the woman of early middle age (Paulina Bernini Viquez), whose innocent marriage to her first real boyfriend sours toxically into violence as he reveals himself to be a drunk and an abuser; and before that the shy 12-year-old (Juliana Filloy Bogantes), who has an unhappy, oppressive mother. The effect is a kind of fictionalised cine-memoir as the older woman – whom one might at first mistake for a real person, taking part in a drama – wanders about her apartment where primal scenes from her past are then re-enacted.

It is a tenderly conceived and well-acted film, but I wonder if conflating all three women’s experiences has supercharged and even overloaded the existence of the everywoman with universal pain, which culminated in old age by a tonally very different embrace of warm physicality. Of course, survivors of abuse can and do achieve precisely this kind of personal triumph but it feels overwrought, and perhaps it might have been a more interesting challenge to dramatise the experiences of just a single woman, and investigate the cause-and-effect narrative sequence in that single real life.

• Memories of a Burning Body is in UK and Irish cinemas from 15 November.