Andersen’s “Little Match Girl”, Bresson’s donkey, the relationship between a German guerrilla and an Argentine pianist, and Helmut Lachenmann trying to stage an opera with the orchestra of the Teatro Colón on strike. In the middle of all that, Marie and Walter try to survive with their daughter.Read More »
This is an adaptation of one of the most important novels of Argentine literary modernism, Roberto Arlt’s El juguete rabioso (1926). Similar in many ways to Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1917), this novel (and the film) chronicles a young man’s journey through a life of poverty on the margins of society in Buenos Aires among anarchists and gangsters during the first years of the 20th century. The novel is essential reading for an understanding of subsequent Argentine literature, yet it is little known outside of Argentina. In El beso de la mujer araña AKA Kiss of the Spider Woman (1976), Manuel Puig was very consciously drawing the whole conceit of the homosexual ‘traitor’/’lover’ and the political prisoner directly from this book.
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Near the provincial town of San Julian, three vibrant characters undertake seemingly mundane journeys that turn out to be subtly life changing. A lonely, fastidious traveling salesman quests for the perfect cream cake to win the widow of his dreams. A grizzly grandfather hitchhikes to town to find his forgotten lost dog and seek forgiveness. A poor young mother hopes to win the grand prize–a microprocessor–as a contestant on a TV game show. In the end, the three will get more or less what they set out for, but it will come to them in ways that they never expected.Read More »
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The “elefante blanco” (white elephant) in Pablo Trapero’s eponymous film is the phantasmagorical structure of what was to be Latin America’s biggest hospital, construction of which was approved in 1937 and started in 1938. In line with Argentina’s sociopolitical upheaval, the project was never completed and is now home to thousands of outcasts who live among rubble, rats, pollution, illness, crime, deadly drug lords’ feuds.
Trapero’s Elefante blanco, focusing on the painstaking work of two shanty-town priests and a social worker, is a trip through urban hell. Contrary to the barrage of political harangue we are subjected to on a daily basis, Elefante blanco lays out the bare facts: a Third World country playing welfare state but in reality struggling to stay afloat. No other aborted social project could make such a visible, powerful impact as the elefante blanco, palpable proof that not everyone is given the same possibilities to attain social mobility and think ahead to a better future.Read More »
Feminism, Victoria Benedictsson, Leandro N. Alem, the Radical Party in Argentina, suicide, stunts, Edgar Allan Poe, the complicated relationship between low-budget films with a political message and the film industry, Robert Louis Stevenson, fiction, facts, greed, gold treasure left by the Jesuits in Argentina, the 19th century vs. the present and the search for truth and wisdom form the background for this portrait of a clash between a Swedish artist and an Argentinian director (Viennale)Read More »
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In December 1965, Telsun had announced that production of the fifth movie had been postponed once again (the original postponement having been part of the February 1965 announcement). The film, to be produced by Sam Spiegel, was to highlight UN peacekeeping efforts along the India-Pakistan border, and some filming had already been completed. However, an armed conflict had erupted between the two nations over the disputed Kashmir territory (including one of the largest tank battles fought since World War II), and a Telsun spokesman announced that production would not resume while the conflict continued. Spiegel had by this time moved on to another project (the 1966 movie The Chase, starring Marlon Brando and the little-known Robert Redford, whom Spiegel had personally chosen for the movie), and as it turned out the project apparently was never restarted.Read More »
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A handful of children are left to their own devices in this subtle drama from Argentine filmmaker Celina Murga. Maria (Magdalena Capobianco) is a girl in her early teens whose family lives in an upscale gated suburb. Maria’s parents are going out of town for a week, and rather than leave her with relatives or hire a babysitter, Maria is put in charge of looking after her little sister Sofia (Eleonora Capobianco), with housekeeper Esther (Natalia Gomez Alarcon) serving as a nominal adult authority figure, though for the most part she lets Maria and the others do what they please. With only their parents bedroom off-limits, Maria and Sofia have the run of the house, and soon they and their friends Facundo (Lucas Del Bo), Quique (Federico Pena), Rodrigo (Ramiro Saludas) and Timmy (Mateo Braun) are spending their days exploring the place. As the kids begin creating their own rules to run counter to the ones their absent parents set down, Esther brings a young relative, Fernando (Gaston Luparo), to play with them, and the privileged kids begin to get a notion of the ways of the outside world. Una Semana Solos (aka A Week Alone) was an official selection at the 2008 Buenos Aires Film Festival.Read More »
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The goalkeeper of a little-known soccer team is kidnapped by a Argentinean government squad and sent to a detention center. After months of torture, he plots his escape with three other young men.
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If American moviegoers have plenty of reasons to feel icky about government-sponsored kidnappings and hidden prisons, “Chronicle of an Escape” gives them another good one, by viewing a fact-based Argentinean story through the stylized lens of a horror film. Laced with dread that builds to a thoroughly gripping third act, it should do well with art house audiences who like their history lessons to come with a shot of adrenaline.Read More »
When Alejandro “Mono” dies, his brother and two closest friends, a tight-knit group since childhood, are left to figure out how to take care of his young daughter, Guadalupe. They want to give her all the love they felt for Mono and secure her future, but there isn’t a single peso left in the bank. Mono invested all of his money in a promising soccer player whose promise hasn’t panned out, and the three hundred thousand dollars Mono spent on his transfer is soon to be lost for good. Read More »