Points: 4
When you need four screenwriters and two directors to make a crowd-pleasing mainstream comedy, something has got to be wrong. Because the saying “the more, the merrier” doesn’t apply here. Either nobody has a clue as to what sort of film they want to make, or there are far too many ideas tossed in just to make sure one or two of them actually work. Or both apply. In any case, it’s a dead end alley.
Argentine comedy La última fiesta (“The Last Party”), written by Lucas Bucci, Nicolás Silbert, Tomás Sposato, and Agustina Tracey, and directed by Nicolás Silbert, and Leandro Mark, rather than a joint effort, is a collective disaster. And that’s an understatement.
Alan (Nicolás Vázquez), Dante (Alan Sabbagh) and Pedro (Benjamín Amadeo) are three grown-up lifelong friends who love each other dearly. When Dante ends a long term relationship, he’s devastated. So his friends decide to throw a huge party to cheer him up. Too bad that despite the party being a success, an expensive painting is stolen. What is even worse is that both the house and the painting belong to a man of dubious and dangerous behaviour. So now the three friends must recover the painting at all costs and against all odds.
La última fiesta faces two major unmistakable problems: it’s cinematically flavourless and its sense of humour can’t get any more basic — it’s hard to figure out which one is worse.
It’s filmed as though it was a long and very glossy TV commercial with no texture, no depth, no tangibility, and no aesthetic criterion other than making everything look picture-perfect. So forget all sense of atmosphere because regardless of the different settings and locations where the scenes are set, they always look pretty much the same. Camerawork and editing are equally generic, so no wonder the film feels so static, so inert. As for the narrative, don’t think of La última fiesta as an organic film, but instead as a string of poorly assembled skits with lousy timing.
As for the sense of humour, for starters let’s say what it is not: it’s not subtle, witty, or parody-bent. There’s no irony, self-loathing, or sarcasm either. It’s not that physical and it’s not remotely intellectual or discursive. Basically, it’s just gross. But even within this vein, it could’ve been effective — I’m thinking of some Farrelly brothers’ films. But that’s not the case of La última fiesta. What you have here is a series of gags depicting people puking on themselves and on each other, scattered faeces, toying with blood sausages, weed bongs, and dildos. The most sophisticated ones involve unfunny innuendos and moronic word fencing.
Maybe if there were just one screenwriter and one director, the total mess of a film that is La última fiesta could have been avoided to some degree — or maybe not. As is, it’s definitely the kind of party you don’t want to crash.
Production notes
La última fiesta (Argentina, 2016). Directed by Nicolás Silbert, Leandro Mark. Written by Lucas Bucci, Nicolás Silbert, Tomás Sposato, Agustina Tracey. With Nicolás Vázquez, Alan Sabbagh, Benjamín Amadeo, Eva de Dominici, Julián Kartún, César Bordón, Roberto Carnaghi, Julián Lucero, Sebastián Presta. Running time: 105 minutes.
@pablsuarez
