This cheekily inquisitive docudrama by Chilean director Maite Alberdi features a unique variation on the long con, and one with a precise duration: nine months. After suffering three miscarriages and under pressure from her husband and in-laws to give them a child, Eleonor Alejandra Marín Mendoza (aka Ale, and played by Ana Celeste in re-enactments) decides to fake her next pregnancy. She is determined to have something to show at the end of it: after meeting single mother Mayra, who wants to abort her second pregnancy, at the hospital where she works, Ale agrees to take her baby once it is born.
The details are hardly believable: eating copiously to gain weight, Ale manages to convince husband Arturo (Armando Espitia) and his family that this pregnancy is on track for her entire term. She reflexively tenses her muscles while he strokes her baby bump and smiles through a swirl of conflicting thoughts at her baby shower. While most con artists must dupe themselves on some level, it is true down to a physiological level in Ale’s case: a judge later testifies that her desperation to bear children may have resulted in a pseudo-pregnancy. How else to explain that the doctor signing off her maternity leave appears to hear the baby’s heartbeat?
The first half of the film depicts this false paradise in candy-coloured reconstructions, linked up by voiceover from the real-life Ale. But as soon as she walks out of the General Hospital of Mexico with her baby hidden in a gift bag, Alberdi switches to the sobering real-life register. Arrested by the police in a motel room shortly afterwards, Ale is now finishing a 13-year prison sentence for child kidnapping. As the talking heads weigh up her degree of culpability, the film’s initial distancing device – showing the various actors auditioning to play Ale – suddenly makes sense. How reliable is her version of events, in particular her claim of the adoption arrangement? The actual Mayra, unable to forgive the abduction, insists it is total fiction.
Even if Ale’s story is true, it highlights the level of her desperation, and the power of societal and biological narratives in setting our agendas. Engaging in a metaphysical parlour game of veracity-chasing, Alberdi is perhaps a little lax in resolving this central point. It allows Ale, in her fuschia-hued jail cell, to remain a broadly sympathetic protagonist – one who, in her later dealings with Arturo (who also served two years), seems to gain considerably in self-knowledge. Reminiscent of Bart Layton’s The Imposter in its portrayal of unfeasible auto-delusion, A Child of My Own is a refreshing branch-out for true crime stories into less violent, more intimate enigmas.
• A Child of My Own is in UK cinemas from 7 August, and on Netflix from 13 August.
