In Marcelo Martinessi’s The Heiresses, Chela and Chiquita have lived together for decades in Asunción, Paraguay, supported by inherited wealth. Debt forces them to sell possessions; Chiquita faces imprisonment, and Chela begins driving other women for money. The distributor’s film record gives these facts without promising a simple liberation story. The car is a remnant of privilege, yet it becomes a tool of work. Its value changes when Chela must move herself through a city she had been able to encounter at a distance.
This shift is unusually specific. Economic decline often appears on screen as a visible fall from comfort. Here it also alters a daily skill and a social position. Chela is no longer solely a woman being served; she carries others, sets out on routes and learns what can be earned by moving. Those trips need not make her suddenly free. The work is shaped by the class habits of the passengers and by the years in which Chela could avoid similar labor. But they expose her to a life that the inherited home had kept small.
In a Berlinale World Cinema Fund booklet, Martinessi describes inherited values as something that can pass like a hereditary illness. The comparison is pointed because property is not the only legacy these characters carry. Habits of deference, silence and dependence may persist after the furniture has been sold. The title therefore reaches beyond the material estate. It asks what Chela has received that she may wish to keep, and what she has received that now limits her. Driving turns that abstract question into a physical practice of taking a different path.
The long relationship between Chela and Chiquita also matters to the story’s scale. This is a portrait of queer life in later adulthood, not an origin story that begins with a youthful declaration. Change arrives through debt, separation and work, circumstances that can make agency feel as much like necessity as discovery. Reading the car as an uncomplicated symbol of emancipation would miss that ambiguity. Its better use is as a measure of altered relations: to money, to the city, to other women and to the partner whose absence changes the home. Chela’s route out begins within the world she inherited.
The passenger seat offers a further reversal. Chela has spent years in a relationship and a class position that made many of her routines private. Now strangers bring their stories into her car, paying for a service she provides. The space is still small, but it opens a route between the enclosed household and a city of other women’s lives.