A scene from The Owners.
By Pablo Suárez
For the Herald
Wouldn’t you like to enjoy the privileges of the “leisure class” instead of having to support it? This one of the main questions posed by the insightful, understated Argentine feature Los dueños (The Owners), by Agustín Toscano and Ezequiel Radusky, which had its promising world première at last year’s Critics’ Week of the Cannes Film Festival. And, yes, the workers in the film very much want to be bosses. Or, at least, pretend they are, if nothing else.
It so happens that Rubén (Germán De Silva), his wife Alicia (Liliana Juárez), and their son Sergio (Sergio Pina) are the caretakers of a farming estate in the northern province of Tucumán. Each time the owners are away, they rush to occupy the main house to have a great time doing nothing except playing the ruling family. In this imitation of life, their reality matches their dreams.
Too bad the owners are spoilsports and come back without previous notice — which sooner or later is bound to lead to trouble. Actually, things start to get cringe-worthy — and not only for the caretakers — right after the arrival of Pía (Rosario Bléfari), the elder sister of Lourdes (Cynthia Avellaneda). Lourdes is married to Gabriel (Daniel Elías), the son of the patriarch who owns the farming state. And since Gabriel is so incompetent at administrating the place, Pía is offered to take over, which she does with much enthusiasm.
This way, no strangers are brought into the farm. The paradox lies in the fact that the family members are more treacherous than any outsider, as a series of unexpected episodes will soon come to prove. Be prepared for a reversal of fortune (and then yet another one) that will lay out a different scenario. Come to think of it, perhaps it’s not that different after all.
Directors Toscano and Radusky come from the realm of theatre, and Los dueños is their first film together. However, there’s no theatricality here in either the performances or the mise-en-scene — even their plays had a strong cinematic imprint. So expect naturalism and no declamatory dialogue at all. Instead, there’s the kind of dialogue that hides the characters’ motivations in order to turn them into ambiguous, sometimes ambivalent, creatures. Understatement is one of the keys to the organic manner the story unfolds — even with its surprises.
Lesser smart filmmakers would have probably gone for a black-and-white depiction of class struggle and class divide, but here the tensions and antagonisms, with their share of unfulfilled desires, are examined in a more oblique perspective with a healthy sense of humour that gives the characters a cartoonish edge that ironically makes them more human. There’s no direct violence, cheap exploitation, loathsome working conditions, coercions or abuse. It’s not pitting the poor against the rich. It’s about power dynamics within each group, and about the often mutable relationships these two groups establish. For the most part, conflicts are hidden, secrets carefully kept. And there are the alliances, which can (and cannot) vanish in a matter of seconds. For nobody here is too satisfied with anything.
Never solemn or judgmental, Los dueños is an exploration rather than a demonstration, and that’s precisely why it’s all the more appealing. It’s as if Claude Chabrol’s The Ceremony meets Buñuel’s Viridiana, but with more than a touch of local flavour, and an original, personal viewpoint all along. It’s about people trapped within a social structure that can only make them desire something they don’t have, precisely because they don’t have it. Or perhaps they want what they have, but also want something else. That is, until they have it.
