It’s pretty easy to summarize the story of Argentine filmmaker Pablo Fendrik’s El ardor, which was screened out of competition at Cannes, since nothing much happens for quite a long stretch of time, and by time the film ends there are not many redeeming qualities to make up for so much stillness. Not that is has to be an action-driven feature, but at least there should be something going on to make it as dramatic as its premise calls for.
It goes like this: a young vagabond shaman (Gael García Bernal) who lives in the forest in Misiones arrives to a tobacco plantation where a father and his daughter (Alicia Braga) live. On the same day, a group of mercenaries also arrive to the place, and force the father into giving up his land. He does so, but they kill him anyway right in front of his daughter. Then they kidnap the young woman and flee, but the shaman witnesses it all — he was hidden in a shack — and soon embarks on a journey to rescue her. So it’s a local version of a western, a genre not often tackled by Argentine cinema at all.
The film’s introduction takes place in no more than 15 minutes. From then on you get to see a very slow and uneventful chase that is prolonged for some 80 minutes, give or take. Granted, there are two or three incidents along the way, but that’s about it. The happy ending is somewhat action-filled. It does have some effective moments and some blood here and there. Period.
That, and a very pronounced lack of pulse and brio make El ardor hard to sit through. It’s too contemplative, too motionless. And while the atmosphere of desolation and death has been skilfully accomplished (so you can sense the asphyxiating heat), the characters development is very poor. That’s why you can’t even care about them: they are just action figures, or entities, which perform the few actions the screenplay provides. We know almost nothing about the “good guys” and nothing at all about the “bad guys.”
To top it all, there’s also a menacing tiger wandering about, meant to symbolize who knows what.
Despite being professionally shot (the sound design is also a plus), El ardor fails to be both engaging or compelling. It looks good, but that doesn’t get you very far.
