Dames, right? It’s the quiet ones you have to watch, although the more flamboyant also require a vigilant eye, especially if said dame is packing a pistol. Mercedes (Elisa Zulueta) is the self-effacing secretary to a senior judge in Santiago, Chile; Maria Carolina Geel (Francisca Lewin) is a murderer. The year is 1955 and, somewhat incredibly, the crime and punishment described in Maite Alberdi’s skittish film In Her Place really happened.

This, in itself, would make a ripping yarn. Geel, a popular writer, gunned down her former lover over afternoon tea in the fanciest hotel in town. She was then remanded in a nunnery, given a derisory sentence — less than two years in jail — before being released with a presidential pardon. Alberdi, whose previous films include the uncategorizable hybrid comedy/documentary The Mole Agent, has turned those events into the bones of In Her Place. The flesh on those bones, however, is the secret life the fictional Mercedes constructs for herself once she gets the keys to the guilty woman’s apartment.

It is an ingenious plotting device. Mercedes is everybody’s dogsbody, at home and at work. Her husband Efrain (Pablo Macaya) is an incompetent photographer whose studio takes up a fair slice of their already cramped apartment; Mercedes whispers lighting instructions to him as she leaves the house to do her own job. Their two grown-up sons do practically nothing — certainly, neither they nor their papa seems to know how to wash up — except bicker and wrestle in excessively small spaces. 

When the judge sends Mercedes to pick up some clean clothes for their celebrity prisoner from her home, she suddenly enters a haven of comparative luxury and calm. It occurs to her to water the profusion of pot plants. She tries on Maria’s clothes. Then she starts wearing them to work. She can eat a meal in peace in Maria’s airy space, read any book. There is a bed where nobody is snoring in her ear. There are also crisis moments, as when a somewhat tipsy man with his own key arrives and finds her wearing the velvet bathrobe he gave Maria for her birthday. Her louche bohemian visitor laughs it off; he doesn’t care who Mercedes is. “This house is like an embassy,” he says. “A lot of people have found refuge here.”

It is hard not to be delighted by the fantasy of dropping into another life whenever you want, especially when your regular woman’s own life is such a slog through others’ expectations and small humiliations, but what is really intriguing about Alberdi’s film is its odd conjunction of form and feel. Serge Armstrong’s velvety cinematography and Pamela Chamorro’s elaborate art design are very much of a piece with classic period films, with a color palette and a level of set detail that never fail to remind us that this is a portrait of very history itself.

It looks as if it might be heavy going, but, on the contrary, Alberdi keeps the tone consistently light, helped in no small measure by Zulueta’s central performance as Mercedes. Even at her weariest, there is always the suggestion of a smile playing about Mercedes’ pretty mouth; even when the men who dominate her life ignore or belittle her, she is her own agent of change, effervescing with optimism and full of funny asides. I was reminded of the late, great Giulietta Masina in films by her husband Federico Fellini, playing women whose blithe spirit could never be crushed.

That exuberant levity has clearly been calculated as a counterweight to the subject, which is explicitly a feminist fable and could so easily have felt didactic. In fact, it is didactic, in the way Mercedes’ sons teasingly call her “the lawyer,” which is only a joke because the very idea is impossible; the way that her boss lunches at a club where women are not allowed past the front door; the way that those dirty dishes are always waiting for her when she gets home from work — not to mention the prurient hunger among the public for any tidbits about the scandalous murderess. There are a thousand tiny cuts, precisely delivered (Maria’s great crime, says her friend with the spare door key, was to be an artist and a woman).

None of this feels like dull instruction in everyday sexism, however, because the film never takes itself entirely seriously. There’s a marvelous scene in which Mercedes volunteers to visit the murderess in the convent where she is confined and finds herself taking pictures of an older indigenous convict, who states baldly that she slit her son-in-law’s throat. Life is much better for her daughter’s family now, she says, and Mercedes gives her that warm little smile.

In Her Place is Chile’s Oscar entry; a surprising choice, really, because it’s so offbeat, sitting alone in its singular corner of the cinema world. You have to say, though, that it fills that corner very nicely.

Title: In Her Place
Festival: San Sebastian (Competition)
Distributor: Netflix
Release date: October 11, 2024 (streaming and select theaters)
Director: Maite Alberdi 
Screenwriters: Inés Bortagaray, Paloma Salas
Cast: Elisa Zulueta, Francisca Lewin, Marcial Tagle, Pablo Macaya, Gabriel Urzúa
Running time: 1 hr 35 mins