What a goal! A metegol, in case you’ve never come across one, is a metallic contraption simulating a soccer field and two rival teams. There are handles on each side, and a couple of players play a match as though it were the real thing. This is what a game of metegol is all about: a make-believe soccer game. But, as the omniscient narrator says, “’the kids one day stoppedcoming’’ and instead dashed to an electronic replica, the “maquinitas,’’ as they are called in local parlance. The kids stopped coming, but that’s not the real problem in Metegol, the movie. The trigger is the arrival of a villain, Párpados, a former resident now turned big soccer star who’s made millions as a professional soccer player. “They lifted off the fabric and we were blinded by the light.” This is they way Rosario-born cartoonist-writer Roberto Fontanarrosa starts his short story Memorias de un wing derecho, which filmmaker Juan José Campanella used as a basis for his new movie Metegol (Foosball). Not being a real soccer fan was a plus in Campanella’s case, for it apparently gave him the objectivity needed to tell a story in which emotions, feelings and perceptions — of the world, of oneself — play a key role. This is what a game of metegol is all about: a make believe soccer game. Metegol’s villain Parpados is not alone — he has brought with him an entire team of professional players ready to beat the hell out of the townsfolk makeshift-home team. The hero in Metegol is Amadeo, a young boy who works as a janitor at the town’s rundown bar. There is a metegol machine at the back, forgotten by almost everyone except Amadeo, who’s a champion player in his own right. On the emotional side of things there’s Laura, a manga-style, wide-eyed young girl Amadeo is secretly in love with. It’s war when Parpados comes a-callin’, declaring he’s ready to dig deep into his pockets to buy off the entire town and have it all demolished to build a high-tech city that will make tech geeks beam with pride. Young and small as he is, Amadeo is the only one who decides it’s time to join forces, to coalesce and form a team to vanquish the unbeatable Parpados and his army of thugs. Amadeo puts together an odd assortment of players — the town’s elderly priest, a couple of drunkards, a few neighbours who’ve never before kicked ball, and himself, ready to beat the hell out of Parpados and his team before the eyes of the whole town — and stop the bar and his beloved metegol from going the way of the demolition crew. Sound simple? It is not. And this is precisely what lays at the core of Metegol — about ninety percent of the movie hinges around this all-or-nothing game between townsfolk and villainous out-of-towners, and this is the pattern Campanella already followed in his successful if controversial Luna de Avellaneda (2004). You see, Campanella seems to have this penchant for the old traditions of a barrio, for the things that may be lost in the name of technological advance. He is, in fact, a strong believer in those values, somebody who will carry the torch of good old traditions as opposed to all-pervading change. This is what irked Campanella’s detractors at the time — Luna de Avellaneda’s narrative was perfectly choreographed, but at the heart of it there was a tearjerker of a story. Mind you, the Metegol story and moral follow the same pattern, so expect a good deal of controversy. In fact, only yesterday the Internet was abuzz with commentary for and against Metegol, even if only three screenings had been held — one for critics, another for primary school students, and Saturday’s avant-première. Plus, of course, the mandatory screening at Cine Club Núcleo, back at its traditional home in the refurbished Cine Gaumont. The conclusion is that the heated tweets and arguments on Internet forums were based on... nothing. That is, if you really mean to be fair, you cannot base your judgment on a YouTube trailer. It was evident that the geeks who had taken to cyberspace to rant against Metegol had actually not seen the movie, and yet were keen on discussing the film’s values and drawbacks. For the few hundred spectators who actually saw the movie, Metegol is nothing short of brilliant technology-wise. And right they are, for all the tools of computer animation and 3D tech have been put to perfect use to produce what, arguably, will be the film of the year in Argentina and will set the standard for similar products to come. All the animation artists and technicians in Metegol have pulled this one off with remarkable talent and an extraordinary capacity to overcome the shortcomings of a small budget (by international standards). Produced at a cost of US$ 22 million and the most expensive Argentine film in history, Metegol’s budget is but a tiny fraction of what a similar product would have cost in Hollywood. And it doesn’t pale in comparison with more expensive films of its type, not in this reviewer’s experience. Campanella himself has admitted to being a fan of Toy Story 2, thus his ambition to produce a movie in which toys come to life to fight evil and to bring joy to people going through dire circumstances. As for Campanella’s use of 3D technology, it must be said in his favour that 3D is not a mere attraction (or distraction) to pull viewers’ attention off the fact that the story is simple, very simple, simplistic if you will. But thing is, you cannot have it both ways: if a story is convoluted and confusing, there’s good reason to complain, but if the same narrative has been reduced to the very basics, it must be a good thing. Simplification is not a sin, oversimplification is. Campanella’s detractors will surely rant against this aspect of his macrocosmic view, arguing that things are not so simple in life. Devotees, in contrast, are bound to enjoy Metegol’s unpretentious narrative much in the same way that they enjoyed Luna de Avellaneda’s down to earth approach to life’s conundrums. After all, hasn’t Mr. Campanella himself acknowledged, once again, that his favourite director is Frank Capra, and that his favourite Capra movie is It’s a Wonderful Life. That Capra movie, in this reviewer’s opinion, was well crafted but ideologically tainted with good but unrealistic intentions. Campanella’s world may be a bit Capra-esque, but I see nothing wrong with it, as long as he’s not faking it. Metegol is an honest product, in case you were wondering, and a perfect vehicle to showcase the talent and hard work of Campanella and his whole team of writers, producers, animators, computer and graphics experts, rotoscopic 3D consultants and voiceover artists. Granted, at 100 minutes’ length, Metegol may overstretch is recommended running time, but soccer fans who regularly follow televised soccer matches will not be disappointed, for Metegol packs the kind of intensity of a real match.
A slow, moody transition to reunification Christian Petzold’s Barbara is a masterly study in individual and collective entrapment An eerie sense of permanent surveillance pervades German filmmaker Christian Petzold’s Barbara (2012) from the first frame to the last, starting with the masterly shot scene in which we see, from a distance, Barbara (Nina Hoss) sitting in a clinic’s garden, smoking to while away the minutes before her shift starts. Detachment is the only survival tool Barbara has left after brief incarceration for (we learn later) plotting against a vigilante state. Maybe her only crime was to apply for a visa to travel west, for this is East Berlin and the year is 1980, when countries behind the Iron Curtain lived in isolation from the western world and controlled the widespread malaise and uneasyness by closely monitoring their citizens’ lives, work, relationships and ideas. As shown in Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s 2006 The Lives of Others, the job of spying on other people’s lives may become a pathological obsession to the point of obliterating one’s own empty life and filling it with the remnants of other people’s activities. Petzold’s Barbara, winner of the 2012 Silver Bear for Best Director and getting a belated première in Argentina, closely mirrors East Germany’s suffocating atmosphere under the Communist régime, when members of the same society divided themselves between “us” and “them,” “us” standing, of course, for the ones regarding themselves as part of the same side of the divide, and “them” for their adversaries, the allies (victims themselves, too) of a system that equalled civil obedience and oppression with social equality. In the first half of Barbara, we watch the lead character — a female medical doctor banished to a small-town hospital for some misdemeanour — through the eyes of others. In the opening scene, it’s the hospital director giving Dr. André Reiser (Ronald Zehrfeld) the lowdown on every detail of the newly arrived Barbara, so sullen and detached that the two men, watching from behind the curtains in the safety of their office, refer to her as “that woman who, if she were six, we’d call sultry” for her introspective behaviour. Like every citizen in a society in which non-conformists are deemed enemies of the state, Barbara is the subject of close monitoring and surveillance, of regular raids of her humble lodgings, of humiliating physical scrutiny in search of potentially dangerous weapons or tools. If only they could, they would perform a brainscan on her to eradicate any possibility of hazardous behaviour — that is, anything running contrary to the state’s tight lid on people’s bodies and minds. But Barbara knows well that detachment is the key to survival, that anyone is a potential spy willing to report on any suspicious movement. Barbara won’t budge, not even after her boss, André, warns her that she ought to mingle and blend in with her fellow workers. Astutely enough, director Petzold’s Barbara starts out as a thriller, throwing random hints here and there and providing snippets of Barbara’s few moments to herself, when she secretly receives and keeps bank notes in water-proof packages which she then stashes in a chimney. We are also privy to her scattered moments of physical contact and amorous frolicking with her lover, Jörg (Mark Waschkea), a West Berliner with whom she has made plans to seek refuge in the West. Although the film’s focus is on Barbara, Petzold’s mastery of human nature and social mores allows him to expose the overall sense of frustration and existential malaise plaguing everyone in 1980s West Germany, where people are forced to fake a convivial attitude while clandestinely harbouring guilty feelings of self-hatred that manifest themselves as cruelty toward others who are also trapped in a cage with no prospect of ever getting out. It is not until the first 40 minutes or so of Barbara that we move from cold thriller to heart-rending melodrama, when Barbara is split not so much between the easier choice between East and West, but rather between the more personal and searing prospect of sacrificing her own happiness for the sake of someone else, someone she has no moral obligations for. The thrilling game of watching a fugitive try to make it unscathed to the other side now gone, Barbara, the film, switches with surprising ease from panscan to the seemingly inscrutable thoughts of a brooding heroine moving against a greyish land and seascape that reflects and stands for Barbara’s and a whole society’s feelings of angst, pain and distress. Shifting from individual to collective agony, Barbara, with a fabulous performance from the multifaceted Nina Hoss and a tight screenplay and direction by Christian Petzold, inches closer to moving empathy and admirable artistry during every minute of its 105-minute runtime.
On the trail of Dr Ernesto Guevara If the premise is wrong, then it follows that the conclusion — and, of course, the full development — of the story is necessarily fallacious. The feeling of confusion soon evaporates, though, when La huella del doctor Ernesto Guevara, directed by Argentine filmmaker Jorge Denti, begins to unfold, with a voiceover manifesting a man’s compassion for the dire living conditions of the poor of the land, more specifically of what’s supposed to be the land of plenty: Latin America. The first-person narrative plays out against the background of an old compass and then, only then, a breathtaking, sweeping view of a mountainous area: the mighty Andes range which clearly marks the route of poverty and exploitation of the uneducated have-nots at the hands of foreign corporations like the infamous United Fruit Company. It’s the young Ernesto Guevara’s awakening to the dismal situation of farmers and industry workers subjected to long hours of toil for a pittance, and the enraging submission of Latin America’s military and ruling classes to the foreign powers that rule their fate. La huella del doctor Ernesto Guevara closely follows on the footsteps of Guevara’s journey around Argentina’s hinterland and up north to Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, and Mexico, his final stopover before joining the revolutionary forces of Fidel Castro and their insurrection efforts against the rule of the US-backed government of Cuba’s Fulgencio Batista. Focusing, at first, on Guevara the medical doctor striving to heal the destitute of Latin America, La hue-lla del doctor Ernesto Guevara is rich in testimony, which it puts to clever use with a static camera closing up on the interviewee’s facial gestures. Also, it presents viewers with enlightening statements about the historical, human and existential journey of a man born and raised to an upper middle-class family, a man who, as fate would have it, grew up to experience the hardships, illnesses, injustices and deprivations of a dark-skinned Latin America, still subjected to abhorrent living and working conditions years after the nominal abolition of slavery. Contrary to the endearing characters of actor-director John Cassavettes, who have no social or political dimension to them and yet are as loveable as they come, the people in La huella del doctor Ernesto Guevara are true political animals. Whether uneducated and unaware of their rights or, on the contrary, fully politicized during their college years, they all share, to different degrees, the notion that there will be no better tomorrow without a fight. Closely sticking to the dictum that there can be no good film without a good script, La huella del doctor Guevara is well articulated as far as emotional reactions is concerned. Denti’s script, however, does not follow a strict, rigorous linear pattern, and this is at times poetic and at times unclear and even disconcerting. It is evident that, right from the start, with documentary footage of unconsolable, devastated people mourning the death of Evita, director Denti makes a strange extrapolation, with self-explanatory scenes as the end credits begin to unroll and the picture comes full circle. This blunder is a minor blemish on the illuminating nature of Denti’s documentary, which tells a well-known story framing it under a new light, pointing to self-evident truths in a far from pedantic or sententious manner. Denti and his team must be credited with thorough research and intelligent retelling and reconstruction, in the case of incidents of which there is no recorded testimony. Case in point: the animated scenes depicting Guevara writing letters to his mother, letters which, after careful compilation, became a travelogue and a close view of the development of the Che’s leftwing ideology, which prompted him to embrace the cause of the poor and the oppressed. Lovingly crafted and functioning as visual / aural intertitles segueing an endless chunk of documentary material, the animated scenes in La huella del doctor Ernesto Guevara are reminiscent of María Seoane’s Eva de la Argentina (2011), an original, highly successful experiment in telling political history through animation. Articulating the narrative’s continuity, the animated scenes in La huella... mark the transition from subject matter and signpost the next issue. Most importantly, they serve the purpose of underlining Che’s moods and feelings during each phase of his sojourn of the less-known side of Latin America. These continuity tools or discourse markers, so to speak, give La huella del doctor Ernesto Guevara the cohesion it lacks in other regards, namely some blurry patches — blurry as pitted against the potent documentary footage of armed revolt and popular insurrection, for example. Faithfully reconstructing the Che’s periplum through years of painstaking investigative work, in times of political apathy, La huella del doctor Guevara draws an illuminating, inspiring picture of a man and a hero, of a man born to enjoy material privilege but chose, instead, to sacrifice his own life for the sake of a cause. Set in the current historical context, and in spite of its minor flaws and blemishes, La huella del doctor Ernesto Guevara, running at a lengthy but rewarding 123 minutes, clearly makes a point of uncovering as many unknown aspects of Che’s years of ideological and armed struggle and his unflinching vocation to help his less fortunate fellow human beings. And, on second thought, the way La huella del doctor Ernesto Guevara ends — in medias res, if we’re talking traditional narrative — fits the movie rather nicely, whetting viewers’ appetite and leaving them wanting for more.
Chronicling Mercedes Sosa’s journey New documentary focuses on artist’s life and personal and social issues If you take a close look at it — from a distance, in a detached manner, if you will — there are many good things to be said about the new documentary Mercedes Sosa: la voz de Latinoamérica, released today in Argentina as a testimony of the life and deeds of the emblematic folk musician with a social commitment. Compiled by documentary-maker Rodrigo H. Vila, Mercedes Sosa... relies heavily on archive material to weave a consistent narrative — a detailed account of the musician’s journey from anonymity to triumph at the Cosquín Festival and international stardom seldom seen by any Argentine folk performer. And it is precisely this profusion of documentary material — well chosen and carefully edited, with each fragment skillfully segued onto the next — that allows Vila to tell a story as complex as Sosa herself. Indeed, in spite of her public image as a leftwing-leaning artist fully aware of her convictions, Sosa, like any other human, was full of contradictions and doubts, and one of the merits of Vila’s documentary is the unflattering, in your face approach he chooses to portray the subject of his documentary. While Vila could have taken the easy road — that is, a downright glorification of Mercedes Sosa as an artist with an unflinching belief in humanitarian causes — he wisely resorts to documentary footage that conveys her moments of hesitation, of doubt and uncertainty. As widely known by audiences familiar with her music and her trajectory, Sosa had to go into exile during the last military dictatorship, and upon her return played a series of unforgettable concerts at the Teatro Opera. Those concerts are preserved for posterity as albums and video tape recordings, as are countless Sosa appearances at different concerts here and abroad. It was around that time that Sosa decided to cross over to fusion with rock and pop musicians with whom she performed on stage and cut several albums. Vila’s Mercedes Sosa: la voz de Latinoamérica, is rich in testimony — both Sosa herself and her musings on life and her fond memories of her early career and old friends, and interviews with the people who met her and knew her well as an artist and as a friend. The new friends she made during her crossover phase take pride of place in Vila’s documentary. Those were, in many cases, unlikely pairings: Brazilian singer-songwriters Chico Buarque and Milton Nascimento, Argentine rockers Charly García and Fito Páez, World Music guru David Byrne, Chilean poet-musician Isabel Parra. This is the “static” part of this documentary, the rest is a personal and professional journey — Sosa’s own — which in turn reflects the painstaking work of Vila and Fabián Matus (Sosa’s son), who toiled for three years to make a film that functions as a dialogue between subject and audiences. Taken literally, Mercedes Sosa: la voz de Latinoamérica, is not a biopic proper: it’s an artistic endeavour that creates a huge musical and visual impact. Apart from focusing on her music and her personal life, Vila’s film traces Sosa’s commitment to social and political causes, presenting her, at times, as a visionary who perceived all the possibilities that Latin America has to offer by way of political union among member nations. In Mercedes Sosa: la voz de Latinoamérica, Vila emcees a 90-minute plus reunion with Sosa, her extraordinary musical legacy, her fond memories of her childhood and young years, when she struggled to have her voice heard. Art was the means through which Sosa expressed herself. In keeping with Sosa’s legacy, the approach chosen by Vila and Matus is artistic, focusing on the beauty and wisdom of Sosa’s life rather than hammering home a message that would have become trite and unsubstantial.
Gatsby: you can’t repeat the past, old sport Baz Luhrman’s adaptation is visually rich but otherwise flawed Is it going too far to assert that The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1925 masterpiece — the indisputable Great American Novel, that Holy Grail critics are still on the lookout for — is mostly concerned with production? After all, Fitzgerald’s formative years were spent at the dawn of the 20th century, a new era full of promises as mass, chain production methods churned out goods for massive consumption, instant gratification and quick disposal. In a broad sense, Fitzgerald, born in 1896 and consequently coming of age in the late 1910s — a decade that breezed past to the sound of jazz, glitter and glamour, and decadent extravaganzas, was brought up to a more relaxed lifestyle, an orgiastic outburst like America had never seen before. It was debauchery and grandeur, being wealthy and shamelessly exposing your riches while hundreds of thousands stood in the background or, worse still, toiled in the coal furnaces that allowed New York City to shine in all its glory. America was changing, and change was coming fast, too fast for many to catch up. The invention of electricity and its multiple applications may perhaps be considered the early 20th century prefiguring the 1990s rise of the digital age, of Silicon Valley, when fortunes were made and lost at the snap of a finger, at the drop of a digit on NYSE’s electronic billboards. In Fitzgerald’s accurate imagination, Gatsby’s worldly preoccupations included electricity, as shown by the strict daily schedule he had drawn for himself as a young man: Rise from bed, Dumbbell exercise and wall-scaling and, third on the list, Study electricity, etc. Completing the list were Work, Baseball and Sports, Practise elocution, pose and how to attain it, and Study new inventions. Born to a family of indecently poor peasants that offered the young Gatz — his real surname — little or no opportunities, the child, unknown to himself, pioneered and became the master of reinvention, that most American obsession accompanying social mobility. The American Dream was possible, within reach, if you strove hard enough. Gatsby — as the reinvented young man chose to call himself — was the perfect, shiny embodiment of that dream. ALL THAT JAZZ. It was an era of celebration and excess. The Jazz Age, in fact, was a term coined by Fitzgerald himself, as the prescient observer (in retrospect) and integral part of that endless night of wild partying and infinite possibilities. Fitzgerald was boldly flirtatious, approaching the ideal of success and achieving it in his mid 20s with the publication of his first two novels, This Side of Paradise (1920), and The Beautiful and the Damned (1922), crowned by The Great Gatsby in 1925. After countless rewrites and restructuring, Fitzgerald knew — like Tennessee Williams would two decades later, in 1947, that A Streetcar Named Desire was destined to be an immortal classic — that Gatsby was to be his crowning achievement.
For Esme & Elena with love and squalor Ariel Broitman’s feature début La vida anterior, starring Argentina’s West End and Broadway sensation Elena Roger in a role that allows her to showcase her thespian and vocal talent, is a deeply melancholy piece about the pains of growing up and refusing to let go of certain mutually destructive emotional bonds. important as training a voice properly. Married to the winsome Federico, Ana studies, rehearses and auditions for the roles she dreams of playing, encouraged by the ageing former diva Bertolini, who sees in her the possibility of realizing dreams that never came true. Not that Bertolini’s career has been without accomplishments — in her day, she was the undisputed top soprano, but an opera singer’s professional life is short, perhaps longer than a classical ballet dancer’s, but only by a short stretch. While Ana embodies all of Bertolini’s subliminal hopes, the German soprano Ursula (Mitre), equally gifted as Ana but much more unstable and insecure of her own talent, is given the cold shoulder by Bertolini. “She’s not up to it,” is the way Bertolini dismisses Ursula. “She needs a lot of hard work yet.” Ana does not quite agree. Although Ursula, in spite of the teacher’s misgivings, may prove a potential threat to her professional aspirations, Ana decides that the German soprano has an angelic voice and that Bertolini should give her a chance. Ana is selfless and goes out of her way to befriend Ursula, talk Bertolini into taking Ursula for private voice lessons, and introduce her to her husband, Federico, perennially lost in reverie, who has the kind of languor sentimental souls find hard to resist. Federico, a gifted cello performer, is not happy with his professional achievements, and would sooner give up the cello in exchange for greater proficiency in drawing and painting, an art form he feels particularly attracted to and secretly engaged in. This is what Ursula — who has come all the way from Germany to Buenos Aires to train with Bertolini — has in common with Federico. They are both unsure of their true calling, afraid to let their talent emerge and shine. Ana is their complementary opposite, the one strong soul they both need to propel them ahead. Ursula is at first dismissed by Bertolini as lacking in technique and poise. But Ana, perhaps more sensitive than the stern teacher, falls under the spell of Ursula’s voice and fetching personality. Ana has made a professional and personal discovery, and it will not be without consequence for herself and for her relationship with Federico, who sways with achingly sweet ease from one woman to the other. Although Ursula’s appearance in their lives meant trouble, the threesome eventually become inseparable, inextricably so. In the same manner that Ana is innocent, naïve and generous, Ursula, although perfectly convivial, has something to hide, or at least this is the feeling you get from her piercing eyes, and the clichéd, trite way she wins the young couple’s trust. Set in Buenos Aires and Colonia del Sacramento, Uruguay, La vida anterior, with a sterling performance by Ms. Roger and a suitably suave attitude from Surraco, is visually gorgeous and an aural delight, courtesy of Ms Roger’s singing and soundtrack composer-sound designer Pablo Sala, who turn the movie into an exquisite musical journey. But things do not work quite as smoothly in regard to plotline and story development — the narrative is rather disjointed and the characters' motives are not correctly explained. It’s not that absolutely everything should be spelled out in full, but La vida anterior’s weak point is the superficial character development, and the fact that all the performers are left to fend for themselves. Which they do, fortunately, mainly in the case of Rogers and the stage and screen veteran Aizenberg. Mitre, less experienced than these two towering personalities, struggles hard to turn Ursula into something more substantial than a sketched-out profile. A fourth character, León (Juan José Camero, playing an on-screen evocation of real-life tango bandoneonist Rodolfo Mederos) is rather intrusive as the ghostly reincarnation of Federico’s older brother, an exceptionally gifted tango bandoneon player Federico always looked up to and under whose shadow he seems to be condemned to live. Director Broitman agrees, in a way, when he says that “this project was a challenge in several ways, mainly on account of the musical counterpoint between tango and opera.” All things considered, La vida anterior is the kind of movie that divides audiences: if you expect the traditional values of a good narrative, a conflict treated with expertise to carry the action ahead, you’re in for a tedious, disappointing experience. La vida anterior’s storyline is not linear. On the contrary, “linearity is disrupted, sustained and justified by (the fact that) the story is told from the protagonist’s viewpoint,” which, in turn, calls for a more attentive, sensitive reading by viewers, according to director Broitman. The goal, Broitman acknowledges, was to make a personal, sensitive film set in a universe all its own, a film within the framework of cinéma d’auteur, which is not necessarily equated with solemnity and tediousness, but rather the best amalgam (between art) and mass entertainment. My guess is that Broitman’s considerations are right, mostly when you acknowledge that, leaving the wayward narrative aside, you may easily let yourself get carried away by the film’s sumptuous visuals and musical riches. In this sense, and this sense alone, La vida anterior proves nothing short of sublime.
A perfect day for mother-of-pearl buttons Endearing documentary-cum-comedy straddles the line between friendship and streetsmart philosophy Even before it begins to unfold, there’s two or three things about the film Cracks de nácar that strike viewers as mesmerizingly beautiful if somewhat odd. The epigram that follows the title, though not without a modicum of charming wit, does not help clarify matters: “Some buttons, since the moment of inception, are destined to end up as button clothes. Only a few are born to shine on a soccer pitch.” Mother-of-pearl-buttons, decades ago seen on everyday clothing items from shirts to dresses and overcoats, are a rarity these days, replaced by plastic, more affordable replicas. Original mother-of-pearl buttons may be found on true vintage garments, and when missing or broken they are replaced with similar plastic buttons, but the real thing is almost never found in the market. Haberdashers, the barrio type, are by far the easiest solution when it comes to replacing a missing button, but snapping up a “twin” button is as infrequent as striking oil in your backyard. The new film Cracks de nácar, which premieres today at handful of theatres in Argentina after a few screenings at the BAFICI festival in 2011, is the kind of mother-of-pearl button your grandma or auntie may have been trying for years to find a replacement for before settling for a cheap, plastic substitute. The “cracks” in the title are neither crevices nor a reference to illegal substances: it’s an allusion to soccer champs. Are soccer champs made of mother of pearl? It’s a hardly contestable assertion which may prove right, but the material normally associated with outstanding players is gold — guffaws would have been inevitable if organizers had come up with the idea of awarding mother-of-pearl balloons to outstanding soccer players. Associations with soccer are not out of place when discussing Cracks de nácar, because the movie deals with a scarcely-known hobby-addiction: table football (sort of) played with buttons standing for players. The table, of course, stands for the soccer field, and two cardboard contraptions stand for the goals at each end. The button-players, need we say this, are not autonomous, however great the footballers they are named after. The button players are manipulated by table football practitioners, one or two a-side. Now that things are, hopefully, a bit much clearer vocabulary-wise, it’s time to delve into the real substance of Cracks de nácar, an endearing movie about the game but, above all, about friendship and bonding between two players-collectors who are equally passionate about a good read, good writing (they’re both journalists), and, to while away a game’s idle moments or to cap off a perfect evening, a shot or two of good whisky. The two leads in Cracks de nácar are rather unlikely and could have never come out of a casting call: film critic Rómulo Berrutti and journalist Alfredo Serra, two revered veterans in their own fields. Now in their 70s but still typing away news reports and reviews, both kick off the ball in Cracks de nácar, which plays out like a soccer game from the moment the whistle blows. Written and directed by Daniel Casabé and Edgardo Dieleke, Cracks de nácar is both a game and a biopic, an endearing portrait of two colleagues and friends bound by the same passion, and an analytical piece on what it is that really draws humans closer together. Thoughtful, humorous and enlightening in its own charming way, Cracks de nácar is beautifully constructed as a picture of the present and sweet remembrance of a near past -- not so distant really -- when things were much simpler and you met your friends over a cup of coffee or a game of billiards or, unknown to many, for a “button football” game, away from computers and cyberspace, where there’s no room for buttons -- only for unconducive Internet links.
The psycho who tried to get away with murder Tesis sobre un homicidio plays thrilling game of opposites NOIR. A good film noir is supposed to rely heavily on such visual and aural elements as a menacing urban setting, German Expressionism-style chiaroscuro, a chain-smoking PI, an elusive damsel in distress with an obscure past, an unsettling music score punctuating the action, the amplified hiss of a cigarette being lit, the sound of a shot of JB being poured in a glass. It’s not that these elements alone suffice to make a piece of good hard boiled narrative, it’s just that you cannot do without them, the only concession being, perhaps, that the order of the elements may be altered at will — though not at random. The presence of a darkly impenetrable character with a pathological obsession adds another dimension to the noirish blend, imbuing the setting and the storyline with an alluring game of opposites — a psycho killer pitted against a self-styled PI in search of some form of expiation for the assassin’s own capital sins and the hunter’s unexpressed but evident pending accounts. THESIS. An M.A. thesis is not just about a careful, attentive review of the existing literature about a topic that needs elucidating — it ought to pose relevant questions and provide answers with a solid grounding on field work and research methodology. As a discipline built on a body of codes and regulations aimed at having justice served, Law can purportedly be manipulated to, instead, serve an individual’s or a group’s vested interests, to mask their true intentions. This is not true of Gonzalo Ruiz Cordera (Alberto Ammann, suitably inscrutable), a young law graduate who sets up a diabolical scheme to prove his conjectures about the existing gaps in the Penal Code. Ruiz Cordera is a fictitious character from Diego Paszkowski’s prize-winning novel Tesis sobre un homicidio (1999), but his ruminations are as true and pertinent as the loopholes in criminal legislation that allow, in many cases, proven criminals and wrongdoers to escape punishment.The contradictions and maladjustments between law and justice are at the core of Tesis para un homicidio, the novel, and they are also the crux of the problem the internationally renowned Law Professor Roberto Bermúdez (Ricardo Darín, malleable and brilliant as expected) is confronted with in the film adaptation when Gonzalo, a student of his yearly postgraduate seminar, underscores the professor’s openly cynical if true-to-life position that the Law cannot be equated with Justice and Truth. Speaking of which, the professor’s and the student’s position may not be as far removed, the only difference being that the former knows his hands are tied and the latter thinks he can, through the sheer power of intellect, get away with murder, literally.
It was a dark and stormy night A bunch of strangers seek shelter at a dimly lit funeral parlor In Pablo Bucca’s gripping thriller Una mujer sucede (2005), a handful of perfect strangers – three middle-aged men with no apparent connection – converge on a small-town funeral parlor where the wake for an unidentified woman is being held. As befits a darkly ominous noirish nouvelle, a storm is raging and the dimly lit, damp funeral home is the only available refuge given the time of night, the weather conditions and some comically twisted incidents involving townsfolk short on patience. A minor digression: if you’re a fan of cartoonist Charles Schulz’s Peanuts, you will probably recall that Snoopy, Charlie Brown’s adorable beagle pet, had literary ambitions that always, inevitably, ran short. Perched on top of his dog house, he would start, over and over, to type a mystery novel. “It was a dark and stormy night” was as far as he would always get.
They drive by night El décimo infierno references film noir, gets nowhere Every literary or film genre has certain rules and conventions difficult to eschew, but it is not necessary to stick so strictly to them to the point of turning them into clichés. It’s difficult to imagine a hard-boiled novel or a film noir, especially when set in the US, where it’s not hot, where a PI strapped for cash accepts an investigation commissioned by a damsel in distress. Think Dashiel Hammett, picture Bogart and you get the idea.