Tag: Argentina

Conversations On Hatred (Conversaciones Sobre El Odio)

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

QUICK SNAP: LIVE FROM TALLINN

A voice on an entryphone in darkness. Deborah (Cecilia Roth) has turned up to see Debora (Maricel Álvarez). Debora is not in a good way (she could be in a wheelchair, although it’s impossible to tell with the lighting of what looks like a power cut). She starts complaining about a home help who opened windows onto the balcony through which her cats got out. Her cats have the names or various film directors – Luc, Ozu, Buñuel, Kurosawa and Kitano, among others – what kind of person would name cats with surnames?

Debora gets Deborah to put the light on, revealing that Debora has a cannula between her legs (the sight of which we’re fortunately spared). As the dialogue continues (and there’s a lot of it) it emerges that both are actresses who worked together in the past before they fell out. Spending time in Debora’s apartment, and in her company, it’s not hard to see why: she apparently never has a good word to say about anyone, and listening to her moan about one person after another is likely to try the patience of an audience.

This makes it near impossible for an actress to elicit any sympathy for the character – not the performer’s fault, just an impossible task. There needs to be some redeemable aspect, however small, for the audience to cling to, but writer/director Vera Fogwill gives us nothing of this sort here.

When, at various points, Deborah utters mantras like, “I knew I shouldn’t have come”, the audience feels much the same.

The other thing about Debora is her apartment, crammed with books, home videos of various formats, rubbish, half-eaten food, spilled cat little, basically an horrific, unhygienic health hazard of an environment that no-one would want to go near. We should be thankful that everyday technology has not extended to Smell-O-Vision or Odorama – this film would smell truly vile, not least because of cats marking their territory with urine.

There’s a further problem here. One character meets with another in their apartment. They stay there for the duration of the script. That’s not necessarily a movie. It’s almost certainly a stage play unless you take some specific course of action to somehow make it work for a cinema audience. Some critics might like filmed plays that make no attempt to be cinema: not this critic, sorry.

Conversations On Hatred plays in the Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival. Watch the film trailer below:

Karnawal

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

QUICK SNAP: LIVE FROM TALLINN

The Malambo dance is both intense and mesmerising, setting the tone for the tumultuous ride of Karnawal. Inspired by the movements of horses, this folk cowboy dance, inherent to the Northern Jujuy region of Argentina, requires discipline and drive. And Cabra (Martin López) is so determined to be a great dancer that he is willing to do anything to get the money for the knee-length boots needed to dance; including running a gun over the Bolivian-Argentine border.

Karnawal starts right in the thick of things, with the young lad handed the gun in the midst of a celebration, and trying to sneak it over the border on a rickety bus. After narrowly escaping the hands of border police — in intense, intimate scenes shot with handheld cameras — he returns to his mother’s (Mónica Lairana) house, where she lives with her national guard boyfriend (Diego Cremonesi).

The film contains a real appreciation for the customs of the region, as shown by the pre-Hispanic rituals of the Carnaval de Humahuaca — locals dress up as bright devils, letting go of inhibitions to unearth and then bury the devil. These are some of the best scenes in the movie, where the personal interacts with history, showing how difficult it can be to break out of the place in which you’re raised. The narrative of the film maps itself onto and alongside these festivities, as his father (Alfredo Castro) is let out of prison, bringing his son along on an intense journey that combines the slice-of-life family drama with the crime thriller.

Growing up in such a harsh environment, only thing that keeps Cabra going is his love of dance, captured well by cinematographer Ramiro Civita and editors Luz Lopez Mañe and Eduardo Serrano, who know the right time to cut and the right time to let the dancing speak for itself. This leads up to the final competition, featuring a blistering performance by López that recalls the frantic drumming scenes in Whiplash.

Karnawal takes a long time to finally come together, layering on seemingly disparate elements that eventually loop back upon one another. But this ambitious narrative often comes at odds with the film’s thriller elements, stretching out its central themes instead of honing them. While boasting great scenery — including the harsh and rugged mountains of Northern Argentina — and a great eye for local detail, the sense of urgency found in individual scenes doesn’t quite work when viewed as a whole.

Additionally, despite López’s passion and strong dance moves, the young lad often seems like a bystander in his own story, overshadowed by the magnetic performance of Chilean veteran (and frequent Pablo Larraín collaborator) Alfredo Castro. Despite superficial criminal lifestyles, there feels like few similarities between the two characters, straining the father-son backbone of the film when it should be its tightest point. The supporting cast is also thinly drawn, including a mother with a paper-thick personality and an overly stoic step-dad, providing little contrast to the central duo. Debut director Juan Pablo Félix has obvious talent in creating and maintaining a tense atmosphere; here’s hoping his next film is just a little more focused.

Should the Wind Drop plays as part of the First Feature competition at Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival, running from 13th to 29th November.

Maternal (Hogar)

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

What constitutes motherhood? Is it something that is hereditary or something that can be earned? This is the question wrestled with in Maternal, which slyly reimagines the story of the Virgin Mary for modern times. A deeply Christian tale, both in its sense of empathy and its themes, Maternal is a precise chamber Italian-Argentinean co-production that wrestles with the meaning of motherhood, finding no easy answers yet imploring the viewer to bring their own faith and meaning to each scene.

It takes place almost entirely within an Italian nunnery in Argentina which doubles up as a sanctuary for single mothers. Either through abuse or paternal neglect, these women, some heavily pregnant, others already taking care of several kids, are given a free space to find their life anew under the patronage of the Catholic Church.

Maternal

Luciano (Agustina Malale), however, seems to be more concerned with meeting up with men than taking care of her own child Nina, who she tells to leave her alone while applying her make up. Her best friend, the heavily pregnant Fatima (Denise Carrizo), is rather different, hewing to the rules of the institution and finding solace in the comfort of the nuns. When the young Sister Paolo (Lidiya Liberman), a novate from Italy, arrives to take her final vows, and gets closer to Fati, the two women’s relationship is strained.

Like many Argentinian films, Maternal is a quiet and thoughtful movie, more dependent on implication than express, underlined meanings. To highlight this point, there is no non-diegetic score telling us how we should feel in any given moment — even the credits are simply accompanied by the sound of traffic. This is a movie of faces, shot with soft light and tender appreciation; we are invited to look and feel as they feel, to imagine what goes through their mind even if they won’t tell us. As we are given such a clear overview of the nunnery — a place awash in pure white cotton, soft billowy curtains and muted candles — and its various rules, it is easy to understand the implications of each scene. Additionally, there are no speaking role for men in this movie; their affects upon these woman more pronounced through their absence. By focusing solely on these women and their life within the nunnery walls, debut director Maura Delpero treads a delicate and focused line right up until the final frame.

Maternal

There is no judgement here. Instead Delpero equally weights the runtime between all three women, giving us ample time to understand their point of view. The central conflict is between the nuns, who are by nature celibate, and the mothers themselves: asking if they can really understand what it’s like to be a mother if they don’t have children of their own. This dramatic tension is heightened when Sister Paolo gets rather close to the neglected Nina, acting as a kind of mother figure herself. Is this right? Can she even be a mother? It’s worth considering that Mary, The Mother of God, herself was a virgin. Yet by resisting easy diagnosis, Maternal leaves it up to the viewer to decide.

Maternal debuted at Locarno Film Festival in the competition slate, when this piece was originally written. It premieres in the UK in October, as part of the BFI London Film Festival.