The Delinquents [2023]

 Argentine filmmaker Rodrigo Moreno’s beguiling and enthralling anti-heist film The Delinquents seemed like a piquant blend of Godard’s radical and subversive flourishes, Rohmer’s freewheeling and enchanting levity, and Jarmusch’s seriocomic existentialist fables. This playful, languorous and intoxicating inversion of the classic crime caper – overturning genre conventions and sidestepping viewer expectations over its leisurely 3-hour runtime – also threw ironic jabs at corporate drudgery, work-life balance, midlife crisis, stifling urban monotony, the futility of meticulous planning and how the desire for escape doesn’t always exactly translate into one. Morán (Daniel Elías), who’s stuck in a dull and tedious clerical job in a bank in Buenos Aires, hatches a ludicrous plan in his defiant pursuit for freedom. He exploits a fortuitous scenario to steal $650,000 – just enough to compensate earnings until retirement for two persons – and slyly convinces his colleague Román (Esteban Bigliardi) to hold the loot, in lieu of 50% share for effectively doing nothing, while he serves what he expects to be a reduced prison sentence. Life, however, never follows a linear path, as Morán encounters the brutish prison boss Garrincha (Germán de Silva), while Román faces an equally torrid in office thanks to their vindictive boss (de Silva, in a dual role), a tough insurance investigator (Laura Paredes), crumbling domestic life and anxiety. To complicate things further, both are in love with the vivacious and carefree Norma (Margarita Molfino). The film’s many delightful attributes include Morán finding solace through Ricard Zelarayán’s hypnotic longform poem “The Great Salt Flats”; absorbing use of jazz, blues and tango scores; quirky conversations and digressions; elaborate fades and dissolves separating its gorgeously photographed sequences; and anagrammatic names, doppelgängers and such eccentric gestures from Moreno.

Director: Rodrigo Moreno

Genre: Crime Comedy/Existential Drama

Language: Spanish

Country: Argentina

El Juicio (The Trial) [2023]

 1985 was a momentous year for Argentina – and a beacon of hope for her Latin American comrades – since just 2 years out of an exceptionally repressive right-wing military dictatorship, its judiciary put the junta’s top brass, including Jorge Rafael Videla, on trial for their ghastly crimes – one that’s drawn comparisons with the Nuremberg Trials for its significance and breadth – and that too in civil court. Though televised for posterity, the recordings unfortunately remained largely unseen. Ulises de la Orden took help of the human rights group Memória Abierta and the Norwegian Parliament to access the magnetic tapes, and then spent a decade sifting through 530 hours of footage and rendering them into 3 hours of immensely powerful and profoundly sobering memorialization that attests to collective resistance through remembrance. Structured into 18 chapters – each touching upon specific aspects of the state-sponsored violations that occurred during the “Dirty War”, from the grotesque to the baroque, including such events as “Night of the Pencils” and “Night of the Ties” – this collage of analogue videos, its historical vitality and political immediacy aside, made for a surprisingly engrossing work purely through an archival assemblage. While maximum screen-time is accorded to victims, survivors and relatives recounting their horrific sufferings and loss, it also regularly peeked into all the present stakeholders, viz. the heroic prosecuting duo of Strassera and Ocampo; the obnoxious and indifferent defendants; the morally bankrupt defence attorneys; the weary judges; and the emotionally invested attendees. The eruption that breaks upon Strassera’s stirring closing argument, where he turned “¡Nunca Más!” (“Never Again”) into a rallying cry of protest and defiance, leaves a lasting impression. Mitre’s engaging film Argentina, 1985, incidentally, chronicled the same subject.

Director: Ulises de la Orden

Genre: Documentary/Political History

Language: Spanish

Country: Argentina

Camouflage [2022]

 Jonathan Perel, in his riveting investigative journalism and docu-essay Corporate Accountability, had catalogued how organizations had collaborated with the Argentine military junta during the “Dirty War”, by enabling abductions, disappearances, detentions and tortures. In Camouflage, the haunting remnants from that dark chapter in his country’s past continued to inform its political context, but the canvas very specifically focussed on Campo de Mayo, a massive army base on the outskirts of Buenos Aires which’d served as a notorious concentration camp during the military dictatorship. The life of Félix Bruzzone, a writer in his 40s, has been shaped irrevocably by the dictatorship and the camp like numerous others. His parents were both disappeared when he was a baby; much later, upon moving to a house close to the base, he discovered that his mother was detained, tortured and killed at this chamber of horrors which still exists like a sinister monster. This low-key work alternately served as a personal space for Bruzzone – he loves running as a therapeutic exercise, which is captured through long tracking shots – and a communication channel with people for whom the camp holds starkly diverse meanings. His grandmother with whom he lived after his mom was disappeared; old friends reminiscing the changing landscapes; a woman who survived detention and has been striving to preserve their collective memories; another woman who secretly collects soil from here and sells that to tourists; artists who draw inspiration from this place; a real estate agent who’s excited about property prices around the site; a palaeontologist who wishes it could be converted into a dinosaur park. He also participates in a “killer race” that the army’s propaganda machinery organizes through the complex.

Director: Jonathan Perel

Genre: Documentary/Essay Film/Political History

Language: Spanish

Country: Argentina

Petite Fleur: 15 Ways to Kill Your Neighbour [2022]

 Petite Fleur couldn’t have demonstrated a more dramatic departure vis-à-vis Argentina,1985 – the two wildly contrasting films that Santiago Mitre made in 2022. The latter was a serious, intricate and politically charged docudrama. The former, on the other hand, was a feral, eccentric and intoxicating blend of black comedy, stylistic playfulness, surreal flourishes and macabre poetry. That it essentially portrayed a warm-hearted story – comprising of love lost and re-found, disintegrating marriage, loss of employment, reversal of conventional gender roles, ennui, existential and artistic crises, and the bad press that “routine” gets – under the delirious, elliptical and exuberantly pulpy guise of murderous impulses, mucky charlatans, marital infidelity, violent crimes, zany outbursts and the sensuous thrills of jazz music, made it all the more engrossing. José (Daniel Hendler) and Lucie (Vimala Pons), an Argentine couple residing in an enchanting French town, find themselves in a mess when, having just become parents, he loses his job as a professional cartoonist, upon which she decides to take up work to enable their financial sustenance. As the soft-spoken man becomes a househusband – taking care of their baby, performing daily chores, living a life of dull repetitiveness – he finds himself losing touch with his creative zest, while realizing in parallel, when his vivacious wife falls under the influence of a charismatic guru (Sergi López), that their relationship too has started going south. Things, in the meantime, take a sinister yet fantastical turn when, one Thursday, he inadvertently befriends Jean-Claude (Melvil Poupaud) – a wealthy, rakish, insouciant jazz connoisseur, and a great aficionado of Sydney Bechet’s mesmerizing titular composition in particular – who he spectacularly kills in a moment of madness, and keeps doing that every Thursday thenceforth.

Director: Santiago Mitre

Genre: Black Comedy/Social Satire/Marital Comedy/Mystery

Language: French/Spanish

Country: Argentina

Trenque Lauquen [2022]

 There’s something inherently haunting and melancholic about films, books and songs – Weir’s Picnic at Hanging Rock, Mohiner Ghoraguli’s Sei Fuler Daal, Murakami’s Sputnik Sweetheart, Chang-dong’s Burning – in which a girl disappears for no discernible reasons and is never found again. Trenque Lauquen – directed by Laura Citarella, who’d produced Llinás staggering masterwork La Flor, and part of the Argentine filmmaking collective El Pampero Cine which Llinás, as well as actress and co-writer Laura Paredes, are also members of – is a bewitching addition to that list. This shape-shifting work – clocking at a staggering 4 ½ hours, cheekily structured in the form of nested flashbacks like Matryoshka dolls, and filled with playful red herrings and tantalizing MacGuffins – both tests and rewards patience. Three investigations were at its core, all of which began in media res and faded off enigmatically. The search for Laura (Laura Paredes) – botanist, amateur historian, part-time radio jockey – by her older boyfriend Rafael (Rafael Spregelburd), and Ezequiel (Ezequiel Pierri), with whom she’d developed an intimate friendship, upon her sudden disappearance, formed this episodic yarn’s central focus. Two curious quests that Laura was drawn into before she fell off the grid, were thereafter chronicled through intricate flashbacks. The first one involved piecing together a racy, intercontinental, epistolary affair; the way she locates old letters using teasing clues reminded me a lot of the gorgeous novel The Tango Singer – another sublime Borgesian work – where the narrator hopes to locate an obscure, evasive tango singer. The second one featured a strange woman (Verónica Llinás) who’s trying to find a rare flower and potentially hiding a fantastical boy. The futile quest for answers, therefore, formed an alluring motif in this delightful postmodernist opus.

Director: Laura Citarella

Genre: Drama/Mystery

Language: Spanish

Country: Argentina

Argentina, 1985 [2022]

 Argentina was no different vis-à-vis most other South/Central American countries when it came to experiencing repressive right-wing dictatorships during the 20^th century (usually helmed by military junta, oftentimes sponsored/aided by the US, and always supported by the upper/middle classes and social/political conservatives) – though, the one it faced from 1976 to 1983, was especially ghastly –; however, in what made it a relative rarity, it tried the perpetrators in a civilian court of law, and that too very soon after the armed forces relinquished its illegitimate powers, which meant that the scorching memories of the state-sponsored violence were still fresh. Argentina, 1985 – reminiscent of Larraín’s No, in how both films vividly evoked momentous events through straight-up storytelling laced with thematic seriousness and stylistic levity, and Guzmán’s The Pinochet Case in highlighting dogged lawyers who dared to bring criminal state heads to account – chronicled the ‘Trial of the Juntas’. The film’s two primary protagonists were the middle-aged public prosecutor Julio César Strassera (Ricardo Darín), and his fiercely committed deputy Luis Moreno Ocampo (Peter Lanzani), who – along with a group of idealistic assistants and defying threats to their personal well-being – led the high-profile trial against Jorge Videla and his top-level cohorts, in defiance of collaborators, apologists, careerists and fanatics. But its protagonists, in equal measures, were also those who courageously took the stands and recounted their gut-wrenching stories of extrajudicial killings, enforced disappearances, custodial rapes and torture, including the human rights activist Adriana Calvo (Laura Paredes), among many others. While the film’s glossy treatment and attempts at wry humour felt distracting at times, the solemnity of its matter which was addressed head-on, aided by committed performances, made it an undeniably necessary work.

Director: Santiago Mitre

Genre: Drama/Legal Drama/Historical Drama

Language: Spanish

Country: Argentina

The Headless Woman [2008]

 Lucrecia Martel’s magnificent ‘Salta Trilogy’, over the course of the films that it comprised of, transitioned from the broad to the particular in their narrative focus – starting with the rapturously dizzying La Ciénaga which encompassed an array of extended relatives, followed by the wickedly provocative The Holy Girl which covered a smaller family, and finally the psychologically chilling, haunting and deeply unnerving The Headless Woman which largely centred on one character. Formal audacity – avoidance of establishing shots that compels viewers to situate characters and discern relationships themselves, complex audio-visual compositions, deliciously elliptical narratives, etc. –, feminist gaze, and caustic political critiques that’ve informed her works, were fiercely exhibited in this oblique hit-and-run tale and its discomfiting aftermaths. The said incident happens when Verónica (María Onetto, in a superb, nuanced performance) – a wealthy, middle-aged dentist whose class privilege is discernible through her coiffured blond hair, chic sunglasses, assured body language, and politely distanced and condescending interactions with native servants and workers – inadvertently hits something… or someone, while driving along a country road. She gets into an incredibly dazed and disoriented state, and, thereafter, starts thinking that she may have killed an Indian boy – the dog in the rear-view mirror potentially indicative of her subjective perspective – which her husband, lover and friends are keen to convince her otherwise, forget and bury. The way she ultimately shook herself out of her stupor – and guilt – was especially shattering. The film, therefore, served as a stunning – albeit, allegorical – indictment of the Argentine bourgeoisie’s clinical self-preservation and all-too-eager disavowal of the estimated 30,000 who were disappeared during the military dictatorship, and how they so easily expunged themselves of guilt and moral culpability through wilful denial.

p.s. My earlier review of the film can be found here.

Director: Lucrecia Martel

Genre: Drama/Psychological Drama

Language: Spanish

Country: Argentina

The Holy Girl (La Niña Santa) [2004]

 If Lucrecia Martel’s stunning debut feature La Ciénaga – with its intoxicating cocktail of chaos, malaise, torpor, vacuousness, fault-lines and undercurrents – was a dazzling piece of diamond, her sophomore feature The Holy Girl – the middle instalment in her masterful ‘Salta Trilogy’, and followed by the magnificent The Headless Woman – was like a cold, metallic razor that clinically sliced through the skin. This brilliant, cutting, provocative, unsettling, sensuous and languid work – which’re Martel’s authorial signatures – focused with wry detachment on how religious frenzy and sexual curiosity can feed into each other for a young, naïve and intensely conflicted teenager. The film’s lurid and devilish subject bore Almodóvar’s influence – he was, incidentally, the film’s executive producer – but this was Martel’s film through and through, with its ambivalent gestures, tonal ambiguities, narrative restraint, unhurried style, flirtatious compositions, and leaving things open to extrapolations. It kickstarted when a middle-aged man takes advantage of a crowd to casually press his groin against a teenage girl, in what is clearly a secret sexual perversion for him. The man happens to be Dr. Jano (Carlos Belloso), a respected and married physician, who’s attending a medical congress at an impressive hotel, and during which time he finds himself getting drawn to Helena (Mercedes Morán), the hotel’s striking owner and a divorcee in a state of emotional dilemmas. And the girl is Amalia (María Alché), a paradoxical, mischievous and pubescent teenager who’s become enamoured by Catholic faith, experiments on her burgeoning sexuality with her friend (Julieta Zylberberg) and starts stalking Jano to cure him of his sins. She, coincidentally, also happens to be Amalia’s daughter, and the ensuing ménage à trois is therefore bound to end badly for all.

Director: Lucrecia Martel

Genre: Drama/Psychological Drama/Religious Drama

Language: Spanish

Country: Argentina

La Ciénaga [2001]

 The stunning opening sequence of La Ciénaga – the spellbinding debut by Lucrecia Martel, one of the most original voices in contemporary cinema – began with a viscerally arresting depiction of torpor, ennui and vacuousness, wherein a group of flabby, lethargic, inebriated middle-aged adults – idling in sweltering weather, beside a pool filled with putrid, brackish water – are in such a stupor that when one of them slips, falls and cuts herself, others barely react. By putting us in the middle of this messy, ambiguous scene, Martel made it clear that the viewers will need to figure out the characters and their inter-dynamics themselves as the intricately orchestrated narrative unfolded, and in turn marvellously set the stage for the film’s brooding, clammy, chaotic, sensuous and hypnotic atmosphere ominously seething with violence. Martel trained her lens on the extended, cash-strapped, upper-middle-class families of the slothful, alcoholic Mecha (Graciela Borges) – comprising of her dazed husband, pubescent daughter (Sofia Bertolotto) who’s homoerotically enamoured by the family’s Indian servant girl who Mecha verbally abuses, handsome adult son whose playful frolicking with his cousin sister is borderline incestuous, and a one-eyed son addicted to hunting – and Mecha’s saner but acquiescent sister Tali (Mercedes Morán) – comprising of her patronizing husband and three kids, including a little son led to believe in phantom cat-eating African dog-rats. Mecha and Tali make vague plans of visiting Bolivia, their kids indulge in meaningless pursuits verging on disaster, and the television relentlessly covers a Catholic miracle. Simmering socio-political critique – bourgeois self-centredness, racial prejudices, class boundaries, religious frenzy, sexual undercurrents and familial malaise – were, therefore, enmeshed into the desultory proceedings, interlaced with terrific use of diagetic sounds, including captivating lo-fi music playing on stereos.

Director: Lucrecia Martel

Genre: Drama/Family Drama

Language: Spanish

Country: Argentina

Azor [2021]

Andreas Fontana, in his directorial debut itself – based on a screenplay jointly written with Mariano Llinás, who made the gargantuan masterwork La Flor – created an ominous, viscerally unsettling, impeccably designed film, on a politically sordid and morally murky subject, with Azor. This superb conspiracy thriller addressed two facets from Argentina’s macabre “Dirty War” period – the grotesque, fascist civic-military dictatorship during which extermination of left-wing intellectuals, journalists, students, unionists and political dissidents was so rampant, that even a false word – even by someone who’s affluent and well-connected to the establishment – could get one disappeared; and, the odious role played by Swiss banks in perpetuating the murderous neoliberal junta, under the guise of “neutrality”. Yvan De Wiel (Fabrizio Rongione) is a Swiss private banker – he’s one of the honchos of a firm, co-founded by his grandfather, that discreetly manages finances of the super-wealthy – who’s come from Geneva to Buenos Aires to retain their most elite clients after his partner René – a flamboyant, charming and enigmatic man – has mysteriously disappeared, possibly into “some Argentinian basement” like so many other dissenters. He’s smooth and appropriately low-key in his demeanour, proficient in multiple languages, always conservatively dressed in expensive suits, comfortable amidst lazy and plush elegance, and is accompanied by his alluring, savvy wife Inés (Stephanie Cléau) who’s his confidante and co-conspirator. As he navigates into ranches, villas, exclusive clubs and secret outposts, with measured steps and eerie calm, to retain his prized clientele, he gets drawn into the rotten core of evil. That he displays implacable willingness to participate, despite becoming increasingly aware of the monstrous repressions around him, made this gorgeously photographed and scored film all the more riveting, sinister and frightening.

 

 

 

 

 

Director: Andreas Fontana

Genre: Thriller/Political Thriller/Conspiracy Thriller

Language: Spanish/French

Country: Argentina

Corporate Accountability [2020]

 The right-wing military dictatorship that was established in Argentina through the 1976 coup d'état, wasn’t just a macabre period filled with human rights violations and brutal repressions, it was also marked by brazen collaborations by private and civil sectors with the junta; no wonder, it’s called a “civic-military dictatorship”. Directed by Jonathan Perel – who’s steadily building a body of work documenting the “Dirty War”, reminiscent of how Guzmán steadfastly devoted his entire filmmaking life or Saura for a significant stretch to the Pinochet and Franco dictatorships, respectively – the ironically titled Corporate Responsibility is a telling mix of formal rigour, guerilla filmmaking, investigative journalism and defiant political activism. Based on the excerpts of a report which was never allowed into circulation, it unequivocally covered the above subject – viz. the nefarious collusion and irrefutable culpability of various organizations, including a few renowned global ones – through 25 “case studies” across the country. Each chapter opens with the company logo, followed by long static shot of the industrial site’s entrance secretly filmed from inside a car – with the colour palette’s brilliance accentuated by shooting them at dawns and dusk – and accompanied by Perel’s deadpan voiceover detailing the multiple accounts of grotesque misdeeds carried out against dissident workers and dissenting voices. Thus, by perpetuating the regime’s ugly agenda – through abductions, forced disappearances, murders and even tortures conducted in detention centers built within their campuses – it formed a microcosm of the state itself, while in turn conveniently reaping rewards through statization of debts, reduction in wages and increase in productivity. The film, by the way, quietly reminded me of Patricio Pron’s melancholic memoir My Father’s Ghost is Climbing in the Rain, through their shared political memories.

 

 

 

Director: Jonathan Perel

Genre: Documentary/Political History

Language: Spanish

Country: Argentina