argentina

The Invisible Eye (La mirada invisible)

by James McNally on May 28, 2011

in Theatrical Release

The Invisible Eye (La mirada invisible)
The Invisible Eye opened the­at­ric­ally at the TIFF Bell Lightbox on May 26, 2011.

The Invisible Eye (La mirada invis­ible) (Director: Diego Lerman): Based on the novel Moral Sciences by Martín Kohan, The Invisible Eye attempts to link Argentina’s crum­bling dic­tat­or­ship with the social order inside an elite private school during the autumn of 1982. Maria Teresa (Julieta Zylberberg) is a young teaching assistant who seems to enjoy the small amount of power she has, imposing order and dis­cip­line on stu­dents just a few years younger than her. She’s also fas­cin­ated by her super­visor Mr. Biasutto, a man who, it’s implied, has received this posting as a reward for unspe­cified ser­vices in the mil­itary coup that brought the gen­erals to power in 1976.

In a per­form­ance with hardly any sus­tained stretches of dia­logue, Zylberberg brings an ici­ness to her role while also showing her youthful insec­urity. And Lerman is suc­cessful in cre­ating an atmo­sphere of quiet terror in the school. Perhaps too suc­cessful. The film itself feels air­less, joy­less and oppressive. We see Maria Teresa either at school or at home, where she lives in cramped quar­ters with her mother and grand­mother. In a rare social excur­sion, she seems isol­ated from her work col­leagues and cool to the advances of a male teacher. But she lets Biasutto flirt with her and take her out for coffee. And then she develops an obses­sion with a male stu­dent, although her only way of relating to him is either as an authority figure, or more dis­turb­ingly, as a voyeur.

With Biasutto’s blessing, she begins spying on stu­dents, ostens­ibly to root out “sub­versive” beha­viour like smoking, but her own sexual repres­sion leads her to spend long hours crouched in a toilet stall in the boys’ bath­room. Here the film and char­acter are remin­is­cent of Michael Haneke’s The Piano Teacher (review), but the polit­ical allegory never lets us get to know Maria Teresa quite as well as the woman Isabelle Huppert por­trays. We only know that she’s unable to relate to anyone as an equal. Either she dom­in­ates or is dom­in­ated, and by the end, it leads to viol­ence and tragedy. Unfortunately, the polit­ical mes­sage is so heavy-handed that events within the school have to be taking place at the same time as par­allel events are taking place in the streets just out­side, which weakens the film. But Zylberberg’s per­form­ance is always inter­esting to watch, espe­cially as someone who seems to be profiting from an author­it­arian system. It makes one wonder what hap­pens to all of these minor cogs when dic­tators inev­it­ably fall.

Tagged as: argentina, fascism, lightbox, politics, repression, sexuality

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A Place Called Los Pereyra

by James McNally on July 7, 2010

in Documentaries,Theatrical Release

A Place Called Los Pereyra
A Place Called Los Pereyra will have its Toronto premiere on Friday July 9 at the Royal Cinema at 7pm. Director Andrés Livov-Macklin will be in attend­ance for a Q&A. The film will also screen July 10–12 at 7pm.

A Place Called Los Pereyra (Director: Andrés Livov-Macklin): In the 19th cen­tury, sev­eral native soci­eties in the south Pacific began to develop unusual reli­gious prac­tices after con­tact with the technologically-advanced people of Western soci­eties. When the Westerners had provided them with advanced material goods and then departed, they would attempt to lure the Westerners back with rituals. Over time, they began to wor­ship these white men and women as deities. Such was the gulf in under­standing between the two cul­tures that they could only con­ceive of their vis­itors as supreme beings. These “cargo cults” per­sist in some parts of Polynesia even up to the present day.

It didn’t take long for the phrase “cargo cult” to pop into my head once I began to watch the beha­viour of the remote vil­la­gers of Los Pereyras, Argentina. Located in “El Impenetrable,” a huge for­ested region nearly 1,500 kilo­metres from the cap­ital of Buenos Aires, Los Pereyra lacks elec­tri­city and tele­phone lines, and so is essen­tially cut off from the rest of the country. That is, except for five days each year, when they are vis­ited by “Las Madrinas” (“The Godmothers”), a char­it­able organ­iz­a­tion from Buenos Aires.

In Livov-Macklin’s verité-style por­trait of the vil­lage, we learn next to nothing about these “god” mothers, or even about the vil­la­gers them­selves. Instead, we join in their lan­guid pace, eagerly awaiting the arrival of Las Madrinas. The focus of the film is the vil­lage school, which we learn is fin­an­cially sup­ported by the faraway charity. The chil­dren are put to work cleaning and painting before their bene­factors’ arrival, and we even wit­ness them com­posing songs and let­ters to wel­come them. It’s all a little bit creepy.

It only gets creepier when the Godmothers finally arrive, nearly half an hour into the film. As it turns out, they are much younger than I ima­gined. In fact, it’s a group of high school girls and their teacher. While they’re suit­ably moth­erly with the younger chil­dren, they also flirt with the older boys of the vil­lage. Over the course of their short stay, they con­duct public health clinics and spend time teaching and playing games with the school­chil­dren. They also take them to a zoo, where I got the impres­sion that the city girls were more inter­ested than their rural charges. For them, the trip seemed just as much an exotic summer get­away as a charity mission.

And then, just as quickly as they arrive, they’re leaving. Being teen­aged girls, they’re emo­tional, shed­ding more tears than the chil­dren. In the days that follow, life quickly returns to normal. The goods they’ve left behind, and the small scraps of hope for a better future, get used up pretty fast.

The film brings up many inter­esting ques­tions about the value of charity. Does this type of work help the priv­ileged girls more than the recip­i­ents of their lar­gesse? Is it just an intense emo­tional high for sens­itive adoles­cents or will it really change them? Will it have any lasting pos­itive effect on the vil­lage? Because of its strictly obser­va­tional per­spective, it doesn’t attempt to answer any of these ques­tions, but it cer­tainly allows you to feel the sense of anti­cip­a­tion and then aban­don­ment that the vil­lage chil­dren and their par­ents and teachers feel. It may even be a little bit unfair in that it doesn’t really give any time to the Godmothers or their leaders to explain their own motiv­a­tions and goals for their involvement.

And although I love the fact that the film makes us wait nearly half an hour to meet the fabled Madrinas, overall, the lan­guid pace may lose some viewers. For the patient, though, A Place Called Los Pereyra delivers an emo­tional punch that will leave you won­dering whether most types of charity exist only to soothe the con­sciences of the privileged.

Official site of the film

8/10(8/10)

Tagged as: argentina, charity

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Plan B

by Robert Bell on May 25, 2010

in Film Festivals,Inside Out

Plan B

Plan B (Director: Marco Berger): If ever there were an award given for most inap­pro­priate lingering shots of snugly covered gen­italia, it would surely go to Plan B, a movie that boasts mul­tiple exchanges with little more than sta­tionary close-ups of crotches. The jus­ti­fic­a­tion is likely some­thing to the effect of exag­ger­ated sexual ten­sion, or gender role irony in response to female objectivity in film, where women are never filmed in close-up without some vis­ible boobage, but real­ist­ic­ally it seems a lot more like, “hey, I can see a dick out­line and it’s turning me on!”

Perhaps this shouldn’t be sur­prising in a film that is essen­tially a per­verse fantasy, with Bruno (Manuel Vignau) responding to his ex-girlfriend’s lack of romantic interest by devel­oping an ersatz homo­sexual rela­tion­ship with her new boy­friend Pablo (Lucas Ferraro). It’s the sort of thing that broad high-concept het­ero­norm­ative comedy is based on, and, if it were an American film, it would likely fea­ture Will Ferrell and Paul Rudd.

But this isn’t a comedy, and it isn’t inter­ested in catering to tra­di­tional male anxi­eties, playing out through a series of awk­ward boyish con­ver­sa­tions and latent sexual ten­sion. The goal is to create an organic union between unlikely lovers, with a pointed weed-induced con­ver­sa­tion about Neverland to let us know that the dir­ector has read some queer theory. They dis­cuss tele­vi­sion shows, child­hood slee­p­overs and Bruno even pulls out some clever lies in order to speed up impending coitus.

Because the actors throw them­selves into the material, bringing charm to some truly dreadful dia­logue, there is minor appeal to what is mostly a series of can­didly filmed con­ver­sa­tions that don’t always propel the story for­ward. The suc­cess here comes from the vis­ible budgetary lim­it­a­tions and estab­lished chem­istry, more so than the film itself, which has its moments, but is mostly plod­ding, sloppy and exceed­ingly uncomfortable.

Tagged as: #insideout10, argentina, homosexuality

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Glue

by James McNally on May 11, 2007

in Film Festivals,Inside Out

Glue

Glue (Director: Alexis Dos Santos, Argentina, 2005): I missed this film at TIFF last year, and was glad to get the chance to see it. Glue is unmis­tak­ably a first film, with lots of exper­i­ment­a­tion, some of which suc­ceeds and some of which fails. Set in rural Patagonia, the film com­bines a soundtrack that fea­tures the Violent Femmes and moody hand­held cine­ma­to­graphy to give us a window into the life of Lucas, a bored and sexu­ally con­fused 16 year-old.

Lucas spends most of his time riding his bike around with his head­phones on. He rough­houses ambigu­ously with his friend Nacho, and when they meet shy Andrea, the three form an unusual bond. This isn’t a film with a huge dra­matic arc, and by the end, nothing really feels resolved, but it cer­tainly cap­tures a cer­tain time and place in the lives of a few characters.

One of my frus­tra­tions with the film was its con­stant pur­suit of the artsy shot instead of the more direct shot. The overuse of extreme close-ups and the reli­ance on nat­ural lighting left me scratching my head some­times, as I tried to figure out exactly what was going on. The use of Super 8 footage was a nice touch, adding an ele­ment of nos­talgia, but again it may have been a bit over­done. There were a few places where a steadier camera would have helped as well, espe­cially when shooting land­scape scenes.

The film feels long at 110 minutes, and since there is rel­at­ively little dia­logue, some of the admit­tedly gor­geous shots of the Patagonian land­scape could have been trimmed, but this is a for­giv­able sin for a first-time fea­ture dir­ector finally get­ting a chance to stretch out things. I look for­ward to seeing Dos Santos’ next film.

7/10(7/10)

Tagged as: adolescence, argentina, bisexuality, homosexuality, Inside Out

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Hot Docs 2004

by James McNally on April 26, 2004

in Documentaries,Film Festivals,Hot Docs

Hot Docs is a doc­u­mentary film fest­ival here in Toronto now in its 11th year. This year, I finally decided to see some films. It’s a huge con­trast to the massive, glitzy, and celebrity-obsessed Toronto International Film Festival that I’ve been attending for the past ten years. Lineups are more man­age­able, for one. And nobody’s looking for stars all over town. In other words, it’s great.

I saw four films this weekend:

  • Slasher (US, Director: John Landis) — This film fol­lows Michael “Slasher” Bennett, a sort of used-car super­salesman who’s brought in to strug­gling deal­er­ships to “slash” prices in spe­cial weekend sales. He boasts of selling 200 cars once in four days. He brings in his DJ pal, as well as a “mer­cenary” salesman just to turn up the heat on the dealership’s guys. He hires pretty girls to “register” cus­tomers to win prizes, including an $88 car. His legendary skills only go so far in eco­nom­ic­ally depressed Memphis, where his cru­sade only man­ages to sell 35 cars on Memorial Day weekend. This was enjoy­able, but bogged down when the sale started to turn sour. (7/10)
  • The Take (Canada/Argentina, Director: Avi Lewis) — Directed and written by Canada’s royal couple of the left, Avi Lewis and Naomi Klein (author of the best­selling No Logo), The Take is a fas­cin­ating look at what hap­pens when the unem­ployed decide to take mat­ters into their own hands. After Argentina’s spec­tac­ular eco­nomic col­lapse in 2001, many factories simply locked their doors and fired their workers. Rather than see the bank­rupt busi­nesses sell off all the equip­ment for pen­nies on the dollar, the workers have begun reclaiming the factories, first occupying them and then restarting pro­duc­tion, without the bosses. Lewis and Klein made the film after their anti-globalization mes­sage met with the ques­tion: “What would you replace glob­al­ized cap­it­alism with?” Though the film doesn’t attempt to por­tray the “occu­pied factory” move­ment as the answer for every situ­ation, it raises inter­esting ques­tions in an emo­tion­ally enga­ging way. (10/10)
  • The Ritchie Boys (Germany/Canada, Director: Christian Bauer) — This film tells the story of a group of Jewish refugees who enlisted in the US Army during WWII and were recruited for a spe­cial intel­li­gence unit and sent back to Nazi Germany, where they worked mostly as inter­rog­ators of POWs. Their story makes for a fas­cin­ating and moving film. Surprisingly, it’s also full of humour and fond memories. (10/10)
  • Super Size Me (US, Director: Morgan Spurlock) — I’d wanted to see this since I’d heard about it at SXSW, where it was screened in March. Director Morgan Spurlock, inspired by a court case involving two obese teens who attempted to sue McDonald’s for their health prob­lems, decides to live for a month on nothing but McDonald’s food. He inter­sperses footage of his daily “meals” with inter­views with health care pro­fes­sionals, lob­by­ists for the food industry, edu­cators, even a former Surgeon General. The film has been cri­ti­cized by some as a bit of a stunt. Of course, eating fast food for thirty days isn’t going to be good for you. (Boy, see the film and you’ll see how much of an under­state­ment that is!). But Spurlock uses his stunt as a way to raise some good ques­tions about per­sonal as well as cor­porate respons­ib­ility. This film makes a good com­panion piece to Eric Schlosser’s excel­lent book Fast Food Nation. A har­rowing, and yet enter­taining, exper­i­ence. And it’s opening the­at­ric­ally on May 7. Check out the film’s web site, too. (10/10)

So, a great start. I’ve got six more films to see in the next week, plus a few more to choose. I’ll try to say some­thing about each one.

Tagged as: #hotdocs04, argentina, globalization

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