The long journey into the night
By Pablo Suárez
For the Herald
POINTS: 3
Ulises (Tom Middleton) is a sexy gay man in his early 20s, with the cutest face and a body to die for. He’s had a fight with his boyfriend Pablo (Nahuel Mutti), an older guy, rather a brainy type than a passionate lover — or so it seems, considering their bond is hardly explored. For whatever unknown reason, Pablo has violently kicked off Ulises out of his house and is determined not to let him come back.
Homeless and jobless, Ulises embarks on a long journey into the BA night life, roaming the streets and going into two-bit clubs that are actually more of a dive than anything else. But not without first stealing some money and a gun from Pablo’s apartment. So throughout a whole night, what viewers get is a tour filled with drugs, alcohol, loneliness, abuse, and even gay bashing.
It’s a shame that, considering how few local films deal with what you could broadly call queer cinema, Diego Schipani’s debut feature La noche del lobo (“Night of the Wolf”) is so far from a memorable one. Or maybe it will be memorable, but for all the wrong reasons. Once again, as is the case with so many features, both local and foreign, it’s not the storyline itself that’s to be criticized. Granted, it’s not precisely inventive, but then again with good actors and a muscular script a handful of steamy scenes of some impact could be pulled off.
But when the execution is so flawed, uninspired, and uneven, no miracle can be performed. Production values are astoundingly cheap, and this doesn’t have to do with having a small budget. Gus Van Sant’s Mala noche had a very small budget and that didn’t prevent it from being a near masterpiece — and it was a debut feature as well. But comparisons aside, La noche del lobo’s art direction, cinematography — meaning both camerawork and photography — and editing are below average and hardly create any sense of verisimilitude. You can see La noche del lobo is almost a film in the making, rather than a finished film. And don’t get me started on all the narrative and aesthetic clichés.
In some scenes, Schipani aims for realism whereas in others he goes for a more formalistic approach. Such stylistic unevenness is far from desirable, but what hurts the film the most is that, in both cases, he fails to get it right. To begin with, performances are so rehearsed and soulless that realism is far, far away — and this is true of all performances, except perhaps for some moments in that of Willy Lemos and Tom Middleton’s. To Middleton’s credit, he has the right physique du role to play his character, so he can sometimes get away with the lines of contrived dialogue.
In the end, you realize the filmmaker had the best intentions in making a different sort o feature focused on a wild and loveless night. That’s enough to begin with, but not for getting it right.
production notes
La noche del lobo (Argentina, 2016) Written and directed by Diego Schipani. With Tom Middleton, Nahuel Mutti, Willy Lemos, Silvina Acosta. Cinematography: Federico Bracken. Editing: Diego Schipani, Sabrina Parel. Running time: 72 minutes.
@pablsuarez
