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FILM COMMENT
Sept/Oct 2003
BUENOS AIRES JOURNAL
Amidst political chaos,
social instability, and economic meltdown,
the New Argentine Cinema continues to bear
witness. Pablo Suárez feels the heat
Against all odds, first-rate indie cinema is still alive and well in Argentina. Defying recession, devaluation, and social disintegration, the latest crop of the so-called New Argentine cinema continues to break fresh ground. A couple of years ago, the award-winning La Ciénaga (01), by Lucrecia Martel, Lisandro Alonso's La Libertad (02), and Bolivia (02), by Adrián Caetano, were evidence of the continuing vigor of the new wave, which nominally emerged back in 1992, with Martín Rejtman's Rapado, a mordant exploration of torpor and apathy affecting Argentine youth and their families.
Released locally in 1996, Rapado developed a small following as well as not insignificant critical acclaim. Three years later, Rejtman returned with the utterly hilarious Silvia Prieto (99), the story of a 27-year-old woman who becomes obsessed when she learns of another woman who shares her name. Rejtman's film was the closing-night feature of the 1999 Buenos Aires International Festival of Independent Cinema (bafici)-the designated spot for the brightest new discoveries.
Just completed, Rejtman's much-anticipated third feature, The Magic Gloves (Los Guantes mágicos), spins the tale of Alejandro, a 35-year-old gypsy cab driver confronting loss, crisis, and separation while remaining ever faithful to his beloved car and sole object of desire. The film, a near masterpiece, at times approximates the cut-and-dried tone of Rapado, and at others, the engaging, infectious humor of Silvia Prieto. It is a perfect combination of both previous films, but goes way beyond them. This time, Rejtman's keen eye for the absurd is focused on addiction and depression, on the crisis of turning 40, on connections made and missed-all permeated by deep melancholia. The tight script and outstanding ensemble acting draw a wondrously poignant portrait of paralysis and incommunication in present-day Buenos Aires. Its unflinching view of the state of things here and now is subversively funny. But what makes The Magic Gloves so compelling is that, however absurd, every element is there for a reason. Chance encounters, coincidences, never-ending car rides, nights at the disco, nonsensical conversations: they all add up to a moving depiction of solitude and alienation.
If Rejtman was the emblematic figure of the first edition of bafici five years ago, this year's festival brought together Argentina's latest talents, chiefly Celina Murga, with her debut, Ana and the Others (Ana y los otros), Ezequiel Acuña with To Swim Alone (Nadar solo), and Albertina Carri, who screened her second film, The Blondes (Los Rubios). Just like the early pioneers of the New Argentine Cinema, who gave invigorating twists to an agonizing national narrative, Murga, Acuña, and Carri presented three very personal features that immediately established them as innovative auteurs with distinctive personalities.
The title character in Ana and the Others is a young woman visiting her hometown in the country's interior, after having moved to Buenos Aires. She does very little except hang out with old friends and search for an ex-boyfriend. She passes the time talking to people-a lot-and coming and going. Openly and ably following in the footsteps of Eric Rohmer and Abbas Kiarostami, yet finding her own path, Murga paints an enticing picture of provincial life. But that's just on the surface, since she's ultimately concerned with exploring the elusive nature of desire. Why does Ana go after her old boyfriend? What does she expect to find? Unanswered questions and unsatisfied yearnings are at the heart of Ana and the Others, that rare film that evokes the allure of memories as time goes by.
Uncertainty is also the key element in To Swim Alone, a thoughtful, melancholy portrait of adolescence and its trials, specifically nascent identity-a recurring issue in the work of these new filmmakers. Martín, 17, devoted to his rock band, is flunking high school. He indulges in the same routine day after day until he gets the opportunity to go on a trip to the beach-where he learns that the more things change, the more they stay the same. With traces of Rejtman's style, but singing his own song, Acuña probes the predicaments and behavior of genuine, heartfelt, and conflicted teens (the cinematography, a cornerstone of the film's appealing ambience, conveys the characters' barely repressed angst). Above all, To Swim Alone is significant simply because it fully understands what it feels like to be an adolescent, avoiding sugarcoating in favor of stylized realism.
The third local film in the official competition, Albertina Carri's documentary The Blondes, is a vigorous quest for the impossible: to fill the void left by the abduction and disappearance of the director's parents by the army in 1977, shortly after the military coup, when she was only four. Conventional documentary is turned on its head, as Carri exposes the film's production process and addresses the nature of cinematic narration in a Brechtian manner. In order to preempt facile audience identification, Carri interweaves her own voice as a first-person narrator with that of an actress playing her. Archival footage has been completely excluded, and so much the better. In the interests of a daring personal viewpoint, all traces of a safe formulaic approach have been eradicated.
Ultimately, The Blondes is about constructing your identity when you have been deprived of parents. Hence, Carri's riveting film is also an attempt to symbolically reconstruct a family that has been literally wiped out. In a confrontational manner, it calls for the recollection and reconstruction of haunting memories and addresses essential questions that a large segment of Argentine society still prefers not to deal with.
Memory inescapably strikes back in another opera prima documentary that's a mostly brilliant act of resistance against collective amnesia. I Don't Know What Your Eyes Have Done To Me (Yo no sé qué me han hecho tus ojos), co-directed by film critic-screenwriter Sergio Wolf and Lorena Muñoz, deals with the late tango singer Ada Falcón-one of the great Argentine divas of the Twenties and Thirties-and her turbulent romance with orchestra director Francisco Canaro. The film starts as a noir thriller. Wolf, a modern Philip Marlowe right down to his raincoat, walks the grayish, not-so-mean streets of Buenos Aires in search of information on the so-called Empress of Tango, attempting to solve a puzzle with more than its share of missing pieces. In the second half, the thriller gives way to an intimate and fascinating character study ensconced in the realm of everlasting myth. Wolf is after things past from a very personal viewpoint: that of a film buff-scholar, a nostalgic tango fan, a melancholy lover of a past golden era revisited in the present.
Nostalgia and cerebral fun blend in Mariano Llinás's refreshing mockumentary Balnearios (02), which parodies and reflects on the habits of Argentineans vacationing at the country's innumerable resorts. How you behave is who you are, and Llinás has an acute eye for the tiny details that draw a larger picture of the idiosyncrasies of his countrymen. Alongside Diego Lerman's dazzling Suddenly (02), Balnearios was one the highlights of last year's bafici, and, as the first film to be shown at Buenos Aires's new art cinema at the Malba (Buenos Aires Museum of Latin American Art), it blazed a much-needed trail for alternative exhibition and distribution in a commercial marketplace flooded with Hollywood blockbusters. It played to packed houses for five months-no mean feat.
And last, but by no means least, encompassing the sheer range of current Argentine talent, two extremely inspired features demonstrated the maturity of a veteran filmmaker on the one hand and raw newcomer energy on the other: Minimal Stories (Historias Minimas), Carlos Sorín's proud comeback after a 13-year hiatus, and Alejandro Chomski's debut, Today and Tomorrow (Hoy y mañana), which was featured this year at Cannes. In Sorín's award-winning opus, three stories are deftly interwoven by the common elements of desire and, alongside it, movement. The film's three characters embark on private journeys toward the fulfillment of their hearts' yearning as they travel to San Julián, in the barren wilds of Patagonia. Sorín fixes his gaze upon these three distinctive individuals as they face crucial moments in their otherwise monotonous lives-for once, amidst apathy, there's a longing for something more. A series of stops during the course of their separate but ultimately intersecting journeys form the cornerstones of a narrative whose beauty lies in its simplicity. A placid meditation on the nature of loneliness, sometimes relieved by the comfort of strangers, Minimal Stories is a film of subtle, keen glimpses into what makes people tick. It is smart enough to suggest and imply, rather than explain and intellectualize.
Today and Tomorrow, by contrast, is a harsh, close-up look at Argentina's current social crisis by way of the story of a young girl whose desperate attempts to scrape by lead her to reluctantly take up prostitution to make her rent. More Dreamlife of Angels than Pretty Woman, Chomski's fiercely honest film gradually sucks you in-partly due to Antonella Costa's absorbing central performance, which recalls one of Truffaut's tragic heroines, and partly due to the astonishing camerawork, which tracks her at all times, yielding a sense of both immediacy and intimacy, as the director firmly eschews psychological introspection in favor of relentless behavioral observation. Like an objective cinema verité chronicle, Today and Tomorrow holds up a mirror to the grim reality shared by all of Argentina.
Despite the country's bleak circumstances, Lucrecia Martel has finished La Niña santa, her follow-up to La Ciénaga; Lisandro Alonso is at work on his second film, Sangre; and Lerman has finished the screenplay for his next project. As long as they have the willpower, the Argentine New Wave and its ever-growing army of new recruits are determined to keep the cameras rolling-come what may.
Pablo Suárez is a film critic for the English-language Argentine daily The Buenos Aires Herald.
© 2003 by Pablo Suárez
