I’ve been doing my ‘Global Cinema’ series for just over a month now, and this coming Saturday I’ll be up to Argentina, which is the largest filmmaking nation I’ve covered so far, and probably deserves more than a single film, not least because I’ve seen plenty of Argentinian films over the past few years. Some of them I covered in my South American cinema week, including foundational oppositional film The Hour of the Furnaces (1968), and other more recent ones like Mariano Llinas’s La flor, and the works of Lucrecia Martel. Through her production company, the director of today’s film was involved with La flor and Llinas’ other work, and is an important figure in the newer efflorescence of indie filmmaking in the country, cleaving to a slow cinema style which may or may not pay dividends depending on your mood. I’ll be featuring a number of other Argentine films of this millennium over the next few days, a lot of which confront not just the country’s past but also topics of sexuality and sexual identity in particular.
A slow burning movie in which, I suppose at one level, nothing really happens — it’s about a young woman (Laura Paredes) at an off-season hotel resort where barely anyone is staying. She’s won the vacation in a competition, and her boyfriend is joining her for the weekend, but in the meantime, there’s some tedious admin at the front desk that clearly bores her and her room and the pool, and then she spots some other women and an older guy who seems to be a bit creepy, and who at length talks to her about something insipid, and suddenly the young woman gets curious about what’s going on. Because there’s so little to do, it becomes a bit of a compulsion for her, like Rear Window: imagining the worst and spinning out stories in her head. In fact, the film is at a certain level about storytelling itself, because another character, a young waiter a local cafe, has his own film treatment he’s had in his head, so there are a few wild stories going around, and when her boyfriend finally arrives, she elaborates what she’s been thinking to him. But yet, still very little happens, it’s all in glances and movements and voyeuristic long shots (shades of Kiarostami too) in which we can’t hear anything, but can imagine some of what’s going on. Others may find it boring, but I thought this to be a compelling story about boredom and imagination.
CREDITS
Director/Writer Laura Citarella; Cinematographer Agustín Mendilaharzu; Starring Laura Paredes, Julián Tello, Santiago Gobernori; Length 82 minutes.
Seen at home (Mubi streaming), London, Thursday 4 June 2020.
filmcentric 