Uruguayan Quixote embarks on justice quest
Héctor Noguera and Néstor Guzzini in a scene from Álvaro Brechner’s Mr. Kaplan.
Mr. Kaplan is an intimate journey with traits of local road movie unwinding leisurely
“I’ve always been particularly attracted to characters with quixotic traits; I mean characters whose longing for epic adventures turn them firmly against the absurd circumstances of their reality. Men who use their fertile imagination as a survival tool in their everyday boring existence, and in so doing, they find a way to avenge death and oblivion,” says Uruguayan filmmaker Alvaro Brechner (Mal día para pescar) about his recently-released sophomore film Mr. Kaplan.
Nominated for Best Ibero-American film at the Goya Awards and submitted as the Uruguayan entry for Best Foreign Film at the 2014 Academy Awards, Mr. Kaplan won Best Latin American Feature Film at last year’s Mar del Plata festival. In addition, it won seven major prizes, including Best Film and Best Screenplay, by the Uruguayan Film Critics Association. Now, is this much ado about nothing?
No, it’s not. However, Mr. Kaplan is not an avant-garde feature that will dazzle you with cinematic flourishes or an out-of-this-world narrative. It doesn’t have to be one and it doesn’t want to be one. Which is just fine.
What you have, instead, is a film that fmost of the time works just as it should, if not better; it’s deftly directed with an alluring mise-en-scene and impeccable cinematography, and it has two leads that infuse their roles with as much humanity and credibility as required to render them true personas with sound dilemmas.
The Quixote-like character that Brechner refers to is Jacobo Kaplan (Héctor Noguera) a 75-year-old Jewish man struggling with an acute existential crisis. He arrived in Uruguay long ago fleeing the Holocaust during WWII.
As a child, he thought that being named after a biblical patriarch meant he was surely destined for great things. Yet life itself proved otherwise. He feels he’s done very little with his life, and of top of that he’s overridden with questions such as: “What’s the meaning of my life?” “Is the world a better place thanks to me?” “Did I make a difference?”
Growing old is difficult for everybody, and considering the circumstances, it’s even more so for good old Jacobo. So, pretty much out of the blue, he sets himself on a mission: after watching a news report about a Nazi hierarch likely living at large and in peace on nearby beaches, he decides it’s high time he embarked on a venture to capture and expose him. Together with his friend Wilson Contreras (Néstor Guzzini), his own Sancho Panza, so to speak, he begins his wild chase for justice and meaning.
Mr. Kaplan, the film, is neither a comedy nor a drama, and it’s not your conventional dramatic comedy either. It’s something very personal, somewhere in between those two genres, with a strong dose of deadpan humour and unexpected moments of emotional resonance with no humour at all. And this pretty-difficult-to-achieve tone is what keeps it breathing new air from the first frame to the last, at an assured pace thanks to a leisured editing. And just like words make their own rhythm, so do expressive silences and powerful pauses here and there.
In a more profound sense, Mr. Kaplan is an intimate journey with traits of a local road movie that reveals its own shape as it goes along. When you thought you knew where it was going, a new path will be revealed. Just like life itself.
Production notes
Mr. Kaplan (Uruguay, 2014) Produced, written and directed by Álvaro Brechner. With Néstor Guzzini, Rolf Becker, Nidia Telles, Nuria Fló, Gustavo Saffores, Hugo Piccinini. Cinematography: Álvaro Gutiérrez. Editing: Nacho Ruiz Capillas. Running time: 98 minutes.
@pablsuarez
