The Lips (Los Labios)

“You want to sit by the window?” No, smiles Coca (Adela Sanchez), “I prefer the aisle.” And so she settles into her seat on a bus, along with Noe (Eva Bianco) and Luchi (Victoria Raposo), headed from a city bus station into rural Argentina. As they ride, the women don’t talk. They sleep a bit, their heads nodding in profile. Seated behind the others, Noe smokes a cigarette, the light briefly vivid, and Luchi looks out the window, as the land turns stark and the night sky dark blue. An empty soda bottle rattles in the aisle.

The camera is close on each moment, and it’s also subtly mobile. Such close shots recur throughout The Lips (Los Labios), which screens at Maysles Cinema from June 13-19, including a Q&A with producer Ivan Eibuszyc on June 17 and 19. As the film follows the women into San Cristobal, an impoverished, undereducated community, where they do their best to help families struggling to feed their children, it insists on the costs for all involved.

The close shots insist that you attend to these costs, sometimes bringing you uneasily near tragedy and pain, or showing too much, and sometimes seeming to remove all context, so all you can know is how Noe responds to a hungry child. When the three women — meeting each other for the first time just now — get off the bus the next morning, they peer at the sunlit desert and wonder. “His name is Raúl,” they agree, the man “who’s supposed to pick us up.” They head off on foot, away from the camera, their t-shirts red and their bags heavy.

Cut to Raúl (Raúl Lagger) — now arrived and driving — in profile. The lack of transition underlines the suddenness of each revelation the women confront. “I assure you it won’t happen again,” Raúl says, not quite apologizing for his lateness as he describes what’s to come, sort of. “I’ll get orders from the authorities to give you all the support you need,” he promises, though they soon find that the “big place” they’re staying is an abandoned, partly flooded hospital, bereft of supplies. As they head out to visit with patients, again and again they’re confronted with what they don’t have, like medical supplies, food, and equipment. The City Council, the source of their promised “support,” remains off-screen.

“The barrio is quite complicated,” Raúl says. “It’s poor. The people here are very needy.” Indeed. Each story is similar and yet also specific. Walter (Walter Aguirre) describes his efforts to keep a home for his many children, whom he names one by one. “The house,” Noe asks, “Is there anything you need to change or improve?” The space is so small and dank, and even then, he worries, it’s not his. “I’d like to have my own house.” he admits, “They lent it to me. If they want it back tomorrow, I have to leave.”

And Roxana (Roxana Berco), apparently pregnant a second time, sits with her mother as she describes how she’s feeling. She lost the first baby, she says (“Her little lung was blocked”), though she doesn’t remember much of that experience, because, her mother explains, in the hospital, “They gave her all sorts of shots.” Now, Roxana believes she’s pregnant “because I want to eat things very much.” Asked whether she feels movements, she says yes, “Mostly when daddy touches me.” Her mother adds, “She’s very fond of her father.” As the weight of what she’s hearing becomes plain and awkward, Coca takes notes and Noe listens, then advises Roxana to make an appointment with the doctor. They part with kisses on each other’s cheeks, close and distant at once.

The film, written and directed by Iván Fund and Santiago Loza, is part fiction and part documentary, its combination of professional and nonprofessional actors blurring the line, expanding the ways that stories can work. The women don’t talk very much among themselves, but they don’t need to: what they see and share is intricate and repeatedly arduous. Enduring and strong, they listen to their patient’s stories, take notes, try to formulate a system to help them. Their reports sound over their trips to one place or another, the voiceover weary and observant. As they’re weighing children, one by one, the report notes that the water is contaminated. “Lots of people drink it, despite this warning. It is hard to get drinking water for basic needs.”

At times, certainly, the women show fatigue and disappointment: Luchi cries, Noe can’t sleep. But even as Los Labios shows poverty and loss, its close focus on so many faces — showing resilience and effort and compassion — maintains a kind of faith. As Noe and Luchi help Coca to celebrate her birthday with a tray of cupcakes, they exchange glances, tearful and brimming with joy. They endure. They find a way.