Yun Jin (Yunseon Kim) is a cute Korean girl with a dominant and conservative father who has arranged her imminent marriage to a friend’s son. Little does he know that Yun Jin is flirting with an Argentine young man behind his back, even if she has to marry someone she’s not in love with.
Huang (Ignacio Huang) is a Taiwanese young man who lives on his own and works the nightshift making bootleg movie DVDs. Bruno (Limbert Ticona) is a 17-year-old Bolivian teen who’s just arrived in Argentina and is going to work alongside his uncle (Percy Jiménez) as a waiter at a two-bit restaurant.
These three distinctive characters are the protagonists of minimal stories anchored in the everyday life and taking place in a common setting: La Salada, the world’s largest street market on the outskirts of Buenos Aires, and, most importantly, a place where immigrants of different nationalities trade all kinds of goods at very affordable prices, mainly because most of the merchandise is counterfeit.
Winner of the Film in Progress award at the San Sebastián Film Festival, La Salada, written and directed by Juan Martín Hsu, an Argentine born into a family of Taiwanese immigrants, is neither a documentary nor a fiction film, but a smart work that blurs the frontiers dividing both formats — a rich trend explored by different filmmakers in this last decade.
So except for a few supporting characters, the rest of the roles are most convincingly performed by non-professional actors who indeed work at La Salada, but do not necessarily play themselves at all. In fact, the vignettes that make up their respective stories are directly drawn from real life, but from other people’s experiences.
The chief merit of La Salada, the film, is not only candidly exposing a multicoloured panorama with its many diverse singularities, but to capture and convey the atmosphere of uprooting, melancholy and loneliness that the characters inhabit.
Even if they are not physically alone, as is the case with Yun Jin — who’s accompanied by her businessman father — they seem to have nobody to share their deepest emotions with. In a very existential sense, they seem to drift through life rather than sink their teeth into it.
In fact, Yun Jin hides her feelings for the Argentine guy from her own father, and sometimes even from herself — and so goes ahead with the arranged marriage.
Huang’s telephone conversations with his mother who lives in Taiwan are limited to exchanging a couple of sentences, one of the woman’s questions always being: “Have you found a girlfriend yet?” He hasn’t, despite how much he tries. And he won’t tell his mother how lonely he feels.
In turn, Bruno has better luck at making contact with another Latin American girl at a local dance. This time, there are warm caresses and sweet kisses. Yet he is estranged from his family and is a clumsy waiter soon disliked by his boss.
With no stridence, in a low-key manner, slices of life transpire here and there, and you get to observe it all as an unobtrusive, fortunate witness.
Because the kind of camerawork displayed in La Salada is both crystal clear and inconspicuous, it follows the characters from the right distance, neither too close to overwhelm viewers nor too distant to make them feel detached.
A discreet distance with a good deal of sentiment, if you will.
Production notes
La salada (Argentina, 2014). Written and directed by Juan Martín Hsu. With Ignacio Huang, Yunseon Kim, Chang Sun Kim, Nicolás Mateo, Mimí Ardú. Cinematography: Tebbe Schoening. Editing: Ana Remón. Running time: 92 minutes.
