Moving sequel to documentary on 1930s diva immerses viewers in a ghost-like story
“We thought this story was closed. But stories don’t end when we decide, they have a life of their own. And something about them refuses to end. Telling a story always means choosing a path, but that one choice doesn’t bury the rest. A part of those stories stays with us,” says the voice-over of Argentine filmmaker and film critic Sergio Wolf halfway into his new documentary Viviré con tu recuerdo (“I Will Go On Remembering You”), now commercially released and previously featured in the International Competition of the BAFICI festival.
Viviré con tu recuerdo is an inventive, personal follow-up to Wolf’s 2003 debut film, co-directed with Lorena Muñoz Yo no sé qué me han hecho tus ojos — a brilliant and touching documentary about late tango singer Ada Falcón (one of the great Argentine divas of the 1920s and 1930s) and her turbulent romance with the renowned orchestra director Francisco Canaro. Above all, it’s the story of a myth that fell into oblivion.
Should you remember Wolf’s and Muñoz’s feature film, you know it starts as a noir thriller. Wolf, a modern Philip Marlowe right down to his raincoat, walks the grayish, not-so-mean streets of Buenos Aires in search of information on the so-called “empress of tango,” attempting to solve a puzzle with more than its share of missing pieces. Then, in the second half, upon finding Falcón secluded in a convent, the thriller gives way to an intimate and fascinating character study by filmmakers who are nostalgic tango fans, admirers of a past golden era revisited in the present.
Now, 13 years later, comes its moving sequel. It turns out that not long ago, Wolf found a silent scene that had been lost while making the first documentary and therefore had never been included. Falcón died at the time Yo no sé qué me han hecho tus ojos was being edited, hence the recently found silent scene with her missing words is a mystery to be explored. Could she have said something that added to the already depicted panorama? And if so, how? Was there another secret to be revealed, perhaps?
Questions such as these are all the filmmaker needs to effortlessly immerse himself and his viewers into a new blast from the past. And it’s the exploration, rather than the result of it, that becomes the film’s subject matter.
Because as filming started for Viviré con tus recuerdo, instead of conclusive answers, further questions arose. What if her voice from a different scene is asynchronously overlapped with the images of the found footage? Would it make you feel that Ada’s spirit is speaking from the remote land of the dead since the movement of her lips in the living image doesn’t match the words? — as filmmaker Edgardo Cozarinsky tells Wolf in the film, and as Marguerite Duras did in her famed India Song. If what this cinematic maneuver makes you feel is subjective, I’d say that there’s an eerie and slightly disturbing quality to it, as though you were in fact watching a ghost film. But aren’t all films territories inhabited by ghosts anyway?
With an enveloping atmosphere partly due to the always moody cinematography of Fernando Lockett — arguably Argentina’s best cinematographer — and in part rooted in Wolf’s hidden nostalgia through his reflexive tone of voice (the voice-over here, as it did in the first film, is far from merely informative) — Viviré con tu recuerdo confidently plays with the elements of the language of cinema and in so doing, it turns into a quest to decipher the impossible and a mostly brilliant act of resistance against amnesia.
Wolf goes after filming things gone-by, and he’s found a remarkable way to not let go of the myth by resignifying the past into the ever-changing nature of storytelling. When telling stories, opening a door leads to other doors beyond which there are stories that, more often than not, don’t want to end.
Production notes
Viviré con tu recuerdo (Argentina, 2016). Written and directed by Sergio Wolf. With Ada Falcón, Miguel Zavala, Edgardo Cozarinsky, Fernando Vega. Cinematography by Fernando Lockett. Running time: 80 minutes.
@pablsuarez
