‘Again Once Again’ Review: An Intimate Debut Feature From Argentina

Romina Paula debut feature, Again Once Again (De nuevo otra vez), is now showing on MUBI, as an exclusive global online premiere. This film is a tender portrait of motherhood, subtly blurring documentary with fiction.

The film opens with a diaporama of old family photos. As the photographic slideshow unfolds, Romina Paula discusses in a voice-over the state of mind she is in now that she is in the midst of motherhood. “Once caught in the hustle of life, you can’t stop to look back,” she says. Again Once Again is about that moment in adulthood when you stop, look back, and reflect.

Again Once Again tells the story of Romina, a woman in her late thirties, who has just left her boyfriend. As she clarifies later in the film, they are just on a break, not separated, or at least not yet. Romina has taken her three-year-old son Ramón with her to stay with her mother, Mónica, in Buenos Aires. Unable to tell her mother what exactly her plans are for the future, while deciding whether she should stay with Ramón’s father, she meets up with her best friend Mariana, goes out to parties with old friends, and tutors German to Pablo.

Mónica looks after Ramón so that Romina can go out with her friends and give private lessons. Staying at her mother’s, Romina looks through old photos which lead her to think about her family’s German roots. Romina speaks mainly German with her mother. As she tells her boyfriend on the phone, she is amazed how Ramón seems to be able to understand her mother’s German, responding to her in Spanish. There are some truly beautifully intimate sequences between Romina, her mother and Ramón, revealing the quiet times of play and tenderness.

Again Once Again was written and directed by Argentinian novelist and playwright Romina Paula, who here stars as a fictional version of herself, acting opposite her own mother and son. Each character in fact have retained their real first names in the film. Paula subtly blurs reality with fiction in order to depict a moment of uncertainty in a woman’s life. The fictional narrative helps to illustrate exactly what Paula is seeking to explore. This is a film about a woman on a quest to self-discovery, lost as to who she is, now that she is a mother, and thus looking for her own identity.

Returning to her childhood home in Buenos Aires enables Romina to reflect back. Thinking about her own family’s identity. In another photo slideshow sequence (there are a few in th ecourse of the film), Romina explains how her great-grandparents emigrated to Argentina after the First World War, not by choice but because her great-grandfather was denied access to Canada. Her grandmother, although born in Argentina, raised her own children in German, “for some strange reason” Romina comments, as if temporarily living in Argentina. Exploring her family’s identity enables Romina to consider her own. Her feeling of misplacement, of not really knowing where she belongs, seems to stem within her family’s history.

Her sense of loss of identity, though, stems from her current situation. For the past three years, Romina has been in a difficult relationship, while grappling with a new status as a mother. She feels overwhelmed by her newfound all-consuming love for her son. Being a mother means new-lifelong responsibilities. She explains how now she must perpetually question her decisions, as to how they might affect her son’s future. The film shows how becoming a mother profoundly changes a woman.

Paula’s film feels like a meditation, like an essay illustrated with a fictionalized storyline, on being a new mother. It is an honest intimate introspection that one rarely sees in cinema.

Again Once Again is on MUBI since July 29.