The Human Surge (2016) A Film by Eduardo Williams

"Were it not for one showy transition of a camera burrowing through topsoil for a macro-photographic tour of an ant colony, The Human Surge might easily be mistaken for a particularly interminable YouTube video, unfolding as it does like the aimless time-killing of bored boys without much to do and a crummy camera to record whatever ends up happening. Facetious as such a characterization may seem for a film with the temerity to divide its action across Argentina, Mozambique, and the Philippines, it's not exactly unsuitable given director Eduardo Williams's subject matter, which concerns the lives of minimum-wage slackers from the aforementioned locales who fill their downtime forging tenuous human connections across Internet platforms. Using a pair of nifty cuts to connect these disparate milieus, the film develops in chapters as if to imply a fundamental interconnectedness between people across the world in similar dead-end situations, yet often the only quality holding the episodes together is the amateurishness of the staging."

Full review continues at Slant Magazine.

Hermia and Helena (2016) A Film by Matías Piñeiro

"Matías Piñeiro's Hermia & Helena offers an implicit rebuke to the received notion that the American debuts of eccentric international filmmakers are bids for accessibility. The film's narrative concerns the residency of a young, Bueno Aires-based theater director, Camila (Agustina Muñoz), in New York City, where she's been invited to translate A Midsummer Night's Dream into Spanish for a new take on Shakespeare's canonical comedy. And while her adventures feature rekindled romances and a familial reunion, Piñeiro takes considered measures to steer clear of saccharine self-discovery drama. In utilizing a temporally and geographically jumpy structure, a series of detours and doublings that frustrate Camila's centrality in the story, and a visual surface that delights in non-narrative distractions, he even goes so far as to obfuscate whatever crowd-pleasing qualities may have existed in the material."

I wrote about my favorite Matías Piñeiro film thus far as part of Slant Magazine's NYFF coverage.

Ardor (2014) A Film by Pablo Fendrik

"Ardor's silliness is best crystallized by a scene midway through, when the taciturn rainforest dweller who's been helping a family of poor Argentine farmers ward off a band of pitiless gunmen manages miraculously to emerge alive from a dead-meat situation. Kaí (Gael García Bernal) is canoeing feverishly away from the bad guys, all of whom are heavily armed and seemingly hell-bent on terminating anyone brave enough to get in the way of their land seizure. Because of the indifferent lensing (the focal lengths are short enough that distance doesn't register) and preponderance of close-ups, it's not clear how far Kaí is from the shooters, but one suspects the space is condensed enough that landing a bullet in Kaí's head wouldn't be too much of a stretch of their professional abilities. Nonetheless, the men bafflingly elect to punch bullet holes in his oars instead, presumably for the sole reason of elongating the movie's build-up to its Leone-lite final duel." Full review at Slant.

Jauja (2014) A Film by Lisandro Alonso

Whereas Lisandro Alonso’s last two films were marked by their almost obsessive linearity, respecting in terms of screen direction the resolute trajectories of their cryptic protagonists, Jauja’s shell-shocked conquistador (Viggo Mortensen) ambles like eyes across a loaded Scrabble board. He tracks inward across the frame, cuts out to its furthest boundaries, darts left and right, picks one direction before choosing, mid-shot, to realign. That his arbitrarily-arrived-at final destination is a rock-strewn overcast vista to sharply contrast the sun-dappled, tall-grass desert that commands the film’s first half has little to do with factual geography and more to do with Mortensen’s increasingly desperate, stupefied headspace. Two things are new here in Alonso's unyielding world: a leading lonely man with palpable emotions and motivations made clear to the audience rather than willfully obfuscated, and a willingness to allow the environment to assume the interior dimensions of this character.

Filling in for Los Muertos’ last-second dropped action figure and Liverpool’s Rosebud-esque locket keepsake is a nutcracker figurine Mortensen finds on the ground and carries with him in his travels—the third straight mundane, mass-produced object to shoulder vaguely magical energy (and, in the recent two, sentimental value) in Alonso’s films. Meaningless on their own, these trinkets appear to hold significance for the characters wielding them, functioning as portals to some alternate emotional reality—Nostalgia? Anguish? Tragedy? Bliss?—that usually goes unseen and buried beneath a stoic façade, but which finally finds diegetic representation in Jauja. It’s telling that the film’s shift into the straight-up surreal and associative (as opposed to the merely narcotized—the dreamy space in which the bulk of its narrative dwells) occurs when Mortensen’s psychological profile is at its clearest. Never quite wearing some Dumontian deadpan, he reacts, like any normal person would, with reflexive rage at an indigenous horseman firing a gun at him, or with fatigue and distress as the days wear on in his search for his daughter. Jauja presents colonial man as assertive and impulsive, yet still haunted by refracted daydreams that are complex in their specificity but outside the grip of his logical mind.



Comparisons to Ford and Bresson—rampant since the film’s premiere in May—feel pretty immaterial in relation to the actual film. It’s absurd that anyone’s suggesting Ford has ownership of the compositional likelihood of bisecting land and sky evenly across the frame, a pictorial mark of American westerns in general (honestly, I thought more of Allan Dwan’s westerns but wouldn’t think of entertaining this particular kinship further). On the other hand, Bresson’s name has followed Alonso throughout his career, but never has it seemed less appropriate than here, where the Argentinian director is allowing plenty of space for his star to craft his own spontaneous screen persona, not to mention composing dimensionally layered shots that contrast the flatness of Bresson’s mise-en-scène. Name-dropping these iconic directors in relation to Jauja—a gesture of foolhardy auteur worship—is a route around discussing Alonso’s strange film head-on.

At the risk of making a hypocrite of myself, a more fruitful touch point for Jauja would be the unpredictable figure eights of montage and narrative present in the work of Carlos Reygadas. The clairvoyant cave woman Mortensen meets on his path—so overly costumed as to edge into kitsch—would not seem out of place in Post Tenebras Lux insofar as she marks a representational leap that goes wholly unwarned, and closing shifts into a separate dramatic space share a temporal bewilderment (are we in the past, the future, or some imagined realm?) that’s key to Reygadas’ 2012 Rorschach test. Alonso was exceedingly chipper and jokey at Harvard's Q&A, a hard left turn from the somber cloud he seemed to drag in from Argentina last time he graced the Archive’s floors. He came across like a guy happily in embrace of inarticulable impulse, repeatedly asking the audience questions as if hoping to relinquish his creation to a crowd of people—a standard move for a contemporary international arthouse director wishing to preserve the ambiguity of his work in stone. But Alonso’s openness had nothing of a trendy air about it, instead bespeaking a man proud of his having worked so close to the gut with such pleasingly ungraspable results. It’s a cliché to say Jauja possesses the indescribably quality of a dream—the kind that can be recapped yet remains impossible to adequately unpack—but it’s a fitting compliment nevertheless. Rationally, I’m not sold on where the film ends up, but sometimes it’s best to let ambiguities linger when the cumulative affect is this overwhelming.

Viola (2012) A Film by Matías Piñeiro

With the emergence of Lisandro Alonso, Lucrecia Martel, and Pablo Trapero, among many others, onto the international scene in the past decade, the Argentinean cinema has been thriving. Joining them is Matías Piñeiro, a young writer/director who now has three feature-length fiction films, a short, and feature documentary under his belt, not to mention considerable critical accolades across the world. His recent film, Viola, especially, was a hit with American critics this year after a strong showing at 2012's Toronto International Film Festival. It's a light and airy quasi-romantic comedy that recalls Eric Rohmer in its casually philosophical chattiness as well as Hou Hsiao-hsien and Jose Luis Guerin in its stylistic atmosphere. It's quite good, and I wrote about it for In Review Online here.

The Holy Girl (La Niña Santa) A Film by Lucrecia Martel (2004)

In Lucrecia Martel's world, seedy scenarios are established only for them to taper off gradually while their psychological repercussions echo in the minds of her characters. In her 2008 film The Headless Woman, that axis point was a potential killing, and in her previous work, the heady and discreet The Holy Girl, it takes the form of a middle-aged doctor's public molestation of the adolescent of the title. Martel's interests lie not in observing the precise results of her central mysteries but in examining the confused psyches of her characters who are forced to make some sense of actions that appear senseless and integrate their repressed feelings of guilt and disorder into functioning everyday life. Fittingly, her films take place in unmistakably public places so that there is no escape from social situations, thus amplifying the clash between fleshy instincts and intellectual affectations. For Amalia (María Alche), a young catholic school girl who lives in a spacious, unwelcoming old Argentine hotel with her mother and hotel owner Helena (Mercedes Morán), an attempt is made to tie her victimization to her religious coursework while simultaneously hiding the particulars from her classmates and her family. For Dr. Jano (Carlos Belloso), an Otolaryngologist at a medical convention in the hotel, his central act of indecency must be shielded from an entire legion of colleagues as well as Helena, whom he quickly threatens an adulterous relationship with much to the ignorance of her connection to Amalia.

Martel relishes the tricky task of balancing several narrative threads throughout the film: Amalia's evolving relationship with her best friend Josefina (Julieta Zylberberg) with whom she shares typically girly pastimes but also a growing sexual curiosity, Dr. Jano's flirtation with Helena and casual treatment of her mild tinnitus, Amalia's persistent stalking of Dr. Jano (the true purpose of which is the film's intriguing perplexity), and several other minor subplots, from the vaguely incestuous relationship of Helena and her brother to Josefina's attempted, but ultimately unsuccessful, denial of pre-marital sex with her boyfriend. As in Antonioni, theme, rather than plot, dictates rhythm, and as such Martel hurdles unexpectedly between undercurrents of shame, sexual desire, gossip, guilt, and the supernatural. Further associating disparate elements is the idea of vocation, which is differentiated by its Catholic application ("God's call" as discussed in Amalia and Josefine's classes) and its practical, common application (a person's job or position in life). If Dr. Jano is a medical healer who betrays his best intentions by defiling Amalia, then Amalia sets out to be a spiritual healer when she chooses not to spill the information about Dr. Jano in favor of an intended religious salvation.

Or is this her intention? The word "mission" is uttered obliquely numerous times by Amalia to Josefina, which would suggest that Amalia has taken it upon herself to heed God's call in delivering Dr. Jano from sin, but it's easy to surmise that there's something else on her mind when she quietly lurks the hotel premises, deliberately placing herself in physical proximity to him seeking brief contact. Was she perversely attracted to Dr. Jano's understated rubbing of his crotch against her behind in a public gathering where a street performer was playing a theremin? Is she trying to tease out repeat encounters? Or is she merely taunting him, making him truly feel the gravity of his actions? Martel makes it clear elsewhere that these girls are capable of immaturity, gossiping disruptively in class about the teacher's (Mía Maestro) out-of-class romantic affairs, so the latter wouldn't seem far out of line.



But sexuality and violence are also at the forefront of their imaginations, and indeed menace emanates from the film like an animal looking to angrily burst from its cage. One mesmerizing, tension-filled sequence whips the camera around frantically in heated anticipation of danger as the girls frolic cheerfully through the woods (almost identical to the woods in The Headless Woman) trying to discover the source of gunshots. As if to cement their careless flirtation with death, a pair of hunters jog through the back of the frame at the very end of the scene. Later, a naked man falls from a window right outside the girls' classroom, barely surviving, after which Martel makes a brilliant cut to Helena's frozen, sleeping body. Amalia places her hand in the air over her back and wakes her up, momentarily borrowing the mysticism of the theremin player. These and other mysteriously troubling occurrences pile up throughout The Holy Girl, lending a premonition of an inevitable explosion. However, this explosion never comes, and the tension keeps elevating until it's unbearable in the final shot of Amalia and Josefina calmly doing backstrokes and whistling to themselves in the dilapidated hotel pool, a potent image of vulnerability. Martel's cinema radiates the sense of multiple things going on just outside our and the characters' consciousness(es), just beyond comprehension, which keeps her films at a near-constant level of anxiety, although it's never quite clear how much of this feeling stems from concrete reasons within the film and how much is just a psychological effect she is able to conjure in her characters in an attempt to accurately reflect their jostled and transient states.

Much of this uncertainty has to come from Martel's totalizing, exacting audiovisual approach, which combines decidedly fragmentary compositions, aggressively elliptical editing, and atmospheric sound design. Few directors today pay as much of obsessive attention to both every square inch of the frame as well as the entire space beyond it; when it comes down to it, Martel ultimately creates environments rather than a space for single scenes, choosing deliberately to visually fragment the space as if to set herself the challenge of expanding the world beyond the frame as much as possible. And yet, for all this pedantry, few directors are also able to suspend the kind of magnificent distrust of the cinematic image that Martel fosters. The surfaces of The Holy Girl seem self-contained, natural, diegetic, yet given microscopic inspection one uncovers sounds sneaking into the mix that seem to have no business being in the particular scenes they're in (or at least not at such a volume). Martel's distinctive manner of framing - filming entire scenes in close-ups, shooting from behind necks, cutting off essential body parts, choosing to let the speaker in a conversation be the character in the blurred background rather than the arbitrary figure in the foreground - is a way of throwing off the comfortable balance of a narrative, as is her radical cutting techniques, wherein an unshowy, seemingly in-scene cut can and often does signal a drastic leap in time and even place.

I certainly haven't comprehensively figured out The Holy Girl on a subtextual level, but it's clear enough that Martel is a highly experiential filmmaker whose evocative works - perched somewhere between the cerebral alienation of Antonioni and the sensuousness of Denis - tend to fly in the face of rational interpretation. That there are moments here of startling truthfulness, however, in which the behaviors of characters seem silly from a logical standpoint but emotionally dead-on, appears to suggest that Martel has elevated her unique examination of human nature to a level of artistry divorced from language. The Holy Girl isn't uniformly breathtaking (a few scenes of casual interaction between Helena and various hotel workers feel middling in spite of their perfectly realized sociological tensions, drawing the attention away from the strongest dramatic areas) but when it manages to fulfill its destabilizing vision of burgeoning sexuality competing with religious and social conventions, it does so in striking and inexhaustible ways.

The Headless Woman (La mujer sin cabeza) A Film by Lucrecia Martel (2007)

The recent batch of audacious Argentinian films have come from some decidedly opaque filmmakers, but among them, Lucrecia Martel is the most willfully teasing in terms of narrative expectations. Her third feature, The Headless Woman, is a monument to diffuse plotlessness after making us believe after its chilling setup that it will be at least a low-key thriller. Instead, it is a cinema of reactions, of effect rather than cause. Documenting the quasi-amnesiac state of a middle-aged woman in the days following an accident on the road where she collides with a force (the identity(s) of which becomes the latent mystery of the film), it purposely excises the kind of empirical evidence that might lead the viewer to an understanding of what exactly happened. Martel prefers creating an ominous tapestry of portentous diegetic sounds and nondescript visuals reflecting the world only as her anti-heroine sees it, thus leaving us without any accurate frame of reference. The result is a film that washes over the screen in an indistinct blur, making it difficult to engage with during or even directly following the viewing.

It is only now, a day later, that I am able to gain my bearings and recall some of the devices she sneaks into the modest frames, which appear at a surprisingly frequent rate and inspire a curiously numbing effect. These are not only cinematic devices, like offscreen noise, subtly tampered audio, and mildly oblique widescreen compositions, but also elusive narrative motifs, such as incest, bizarre family dynamics, and the intermittent presence of lower-class Argentinians. Martel emphasizes nothing, so it's easy to second guess oneself and wonder if what was seen was really processed or interpreted correctly. Further shrouding the content is the fact that our new experiences are also the main character Verónica's (María Onetto); the guilt, anxiety, and dissociation forged by her accident shifts her significantly out of complacency, to the point where she seems to be reintegrating herself into her own life. Her impending routines - family gatherings, massage sessions, and work as a dental hygienist - remain systematic, yet it is always as if Verónica is experiencing them passively for the first time, a confused voyeur to her own existence. When advanced sexually by her husband's cousin, she first reacts in a trance, then gives in, assuming it is something she has done comfortably for a while. Another crucial scene involves her sitting down with members of her family watching old video tapes and finding herself unable to detect whether the names her mother uses for identification with certain individuals in the video are indeed correct.

For a large portion of time, Verónica remains seemingly adrift from her sense of self, until an unexplainable epiphany leads her to surmise that it was a boy that she ran over with her car. This instantly jars with the audience's preconceived notions, because a relatively identifiable, albeit indefinite, image shown through the rear-view mirror of her car earlier in the film revealed the corpse of a dog. It can be recalled however that the film's dynamic opening frames captured a group of three dark-skinned children and their dog playing hide-and-go-seek along the dirt road through the deserted outskirts of town. When the collision occurs, Verónica blankly stays in the driver's seat of her car, refusing to identify the victim of the crash. In doing so, the film establishes an aversion to sight that is two-fold: firstly, that what is seen may not always be the whole truth, and secondly, that there is a consuming desire not to look, for to see is to face the validation of horror. Accordingly, The Headless Woman is a visually hazy film, heavy on off-center framings and shallow focus, revealing ghostly figures beyond the scope of Verónica's foggy vision.



The realization of the central character's own faults is also something of a vague regaining of her own conscience, for she begins to make decisions that come from a recognizable motivation. She openly admits her hunch to her husband and asks him to drive her out to the scene of the crash in the middle of the night, making it clear that she finally wants to extinguish her guilt through confirmation. However, when nothing to her suspicions is found on the road, she seems to recoil slightly back into her detached state and pursues knowledge of the accident less actively. Gradually, it appears that Verónica is less interested in knowing what happened as an act of justice as she is in simply being able to acknowledge the facts and move on with her life in psychological order. (Such a conceit resembles Antonioni's Blow-Up, in which the pursuit for objective truth was equally misleading. Coincidentally, María Onetto bears a physical and stylistic resemblance to Monica Vitti.) The film's pacing grows increasingly sluggish and fragmentary until after Verónica makes the classic Hitchockian identity transformation (dying her hair from lucid blond to pitch black), it comes to an unexpected halt, one that is far from indicated by the context of the final shot.

Although nearly the whole of The Headless Woman rests on the minor variations, or lack thereof, in actress María Onetto's expression, the film can hardly be categorized as a psychological drama. Rather, it's a purely phenomenological work which is more interested in making us experience before understanding or interpreting. It is also ostensibly a condemnation of a somnambulistic middle class, Verónica being the scathing microcosm, founded on the clear delineations the film makes between Argentinian social classes. Nearly all of the dark-skinned characters in the film function as servants to Verónica's family, and the boy that she presumably hits with her car is further proof of the inability of the middle class to recognize their prejudices. This theme lines Martel's film up with a structurally similar work that also deals with deeply unacknowledged biases: Michael Haneke's Caché. But whereas Haneke's film finds tantalizing ways to augment its enigmatic mystery, The Headless Woman deliberately lounges in a more stoic atmosphere, and for this, it's often a frustrating, alienating piece of Antoniennui introduced by a masterful pre-credit sequence that would suggest a more diversely moody film.

Liverpool (2008) A Film by Lisandro Alonso

It is a curious thing to be so thoroughly moved by a film that is less an authorial work of art than it is a fact of life, a spontaneous creation devised out of instinct as if a necessary tool for survival. Such seems to be the case with the work of Argentinian Lisandro Alonso, a filmmaker who is resolute in his insistence on a laissez-faire approach, yet deeply impassioned in his curiosity for observing life. The central figure in his latest film Liverpool is not an actor; Alonso found him working as a caterpillar operator, spoke with him briefly while pretending to be a magazine photographer, asked him to be in a movie, which was met with disbelief, and so Alonso returned a while later and persisted in asking him to be in a movie. That Juan Fernandez is a real person stripped from a real environment and not a performer tells a lot about Alonso's desire to approximate nature. Incidentally, Fernandez, playing a silent seaman named Farrel traveling to the southernmost portion of the world, delivers one of the most fascinating performances in recent memory without ever saying or doing anything significant.

Early on in the film, Farrel leaves the cargo ship he is stationed in to travel to Tierra del Fuego, the diminutive farming village he grew up in but has not returned to for many years. This introduces a pattern the film gradually creates of leaving spaces empty and moving on to a new setting. The entirety of Liverpool involves movement from one place to another yet it feels perpetually on the brink of greater movement, indicated by Farrel's nervous fidgeting when positioned alone in a space. He is constantly on a path, but the destination of this path becomes more and more ambiguous once we observe Farrel leave Tierra del Fuego as soon as he arrives. His estranged mother is bedridden and forgetful, shrugging off Farrel's attempts to jog her memory of his identity. He only exchanges a few words with his father and otherwise discovers his disabled daughter that he had never met. The snow-covered village is nestled between foggy hills so as to insulate it entirely from the outside world. The few people who exist there, blank and beset by everyday chores, are mirrors to their extreme landscape.



Left fulfilled but ultimately unsatisfied, Farrel leaves the village abruptly. But, in a move that takes Alonso's cinema in a new direction, the camera remains static as he trudges away. Once he's about as far from the camera as any of Alonso's protagonists, the film cuts back into the home of his family. Alonso abandons Farrel and completes the final twenty minutes of the film in Tierra del Fuego; "he's always leaving, so then he leaves the film," Alonso says plainly. This is not the only difference between Liverpool and his previous features though. Los Muertos followed its similarly unreadable protagonist unceasingly through a homogeneous environment, hardly ever letting him out of the frame, whereas Liverpool seems interested in more than just its enigmatic central figure. It is also consumed by the physicality of spaces, both interior and exterior, on ocean or on land, at night or during day. There is overwhelming authenticity in the objects positioned in the frame, the aged paint on the wall, the off-kilter positioning of a window shade, and the startlingly beautiful natural light. One gets the sense that these are real spaces that are lived in and are not tampered with, and of course this is the truth. Alonso wants his film to smack with the pang of reality so that you can feel the physical as well as emotional weight of it.

These types of formal pleasures in Liverpool are countless. Every composition is mesmerizing yet never overly planned out; there is instead a sense of fragmentation and improvisation in the shots. Several of the opening scenes conceal views of seemingly crucial objects, such as Farrel's inscription on the side of one of the boat's pillars. Similarly, Farrel stares out of the frame at emptiness which we do not see, directing our attention at a world outside of the cinema, at worlds which have yet to be explored. Alonso illuminates as many of those neglected locations as he does mysteries about Farrel and his family. The film's thought-provoking final shot operates as a vehicle through which to piece together the events that take place over the course of the film. Great melancholy washes over the screen in the image of a red "Liverpool" keychain.

NHFF: The Burning Plain (2009) A Film by Guillermo Arriaga

Predictions of what a filmmaker's next project will be like are hardly ever more accurate than when dealing with the work of writer Guillermo Arriaga. His last three screenwriting endeavors, each a collaboration with fellow Mexican director Alejandro González Iñárritu, have been downbeat emotional collages that link three seemingly disparate stories into one powerful, if contrived, comment on the interconnectedness of the modern world. With The Burning Plain, Arriaga has for the first time taken his shot at the director's chair, and little has changed. He is still working in the same territory, and for that alone he should not be criticized; it's not so much a "safe zone" as it is a unique way of seeing the world, just as Bela Tarr should not be hammered for making a seven hour epic in slow-take black and white and then moving on to three more similar films, or Ingmar Bergman for making different variations of the same themes throughout his prolific career. At the same time, something tells me Arriaga's conjunctive narrative style is getting particularly old, that the mode he has chosen gives him considerably less flexibility, perhaps even that he is consciously forcing stories together to fit this mold.

While this may be true in general, I do not suspect this to be the case with The Burning Plain. Something about it speaks of greater personality; Arriaga seems closer to the work, and understandably so, considering he wouldn't have taken the initiative to direct had he not felt he could bring something more inspired to the film than what another individual (Iñárritu?) could. The film takes us back to Arriaga's favorite landscape dichotomy: that of the untamed, expansive desert and the bleak modern suburban life, in this case the difference between New Mexico and Oregon. Also, he has predictably fallen back on his same tick of triangular storytelling, spontaneously shuffling between the three points of interest. There is the story of Sylvia (Charlize Theron), an exhausted, guilt-ridden waitress in Oregon who engages in meaningless sex with various men as a way of coping with her troubles. Similarly ashamed is Gina (Kim Basinger), a married woman who maintains a secretive affair with a Mexican man whom she meets in a dilapidated trailer in the middle of nowhere behind the back of her unknowing family, although her coming-of-age daughter Mariana (Jennifer Lawrence) is suspicious and proactive. We also meet Maria (Tessa La), a young girl whose father becomes severely impaired in a plane accident, causing her to search with her father's friend for the mother she never knew, who happens to be Sylvia.

Because Arriaga's mechanics are so refined at this point, his editing so invisible when shifting stories, one perceives the story as all taking place during the same time. However, temporal dissonance is one new element that Arriaga embraces with The Burning Plain. Revealing how it occurs would spoil the film, as it is meant to provide a startling revelation towards the end, but credit is due to Arriaga for refraining from providing too many clues to make the unveiling predictable. Still, this is not to say that it is some surprise twist that gives the film integrity. Arriaga significantly downplays this moment, and the film continues for approximately thirty minutes after, steering it away from an impermanent entertainment and more towards an emotional character study that feels fully vested in. And when I say fully vested in, an important distinction must be noted; that does not mean the drama is overemotional and bloated, as is often the case in Iñárritu's Babel, but rather that it is carefully observed. Only once does Arriaga resort to the "crying montage", and it is considerably less painful and prolonged than in the past.



The drama only gets tiresome for its continuous gloominess, not for any lack of realism. Arriaga clearly lost his funny bone a long time before he had the opportunity to write his first script, and it often times results in an awfully one-sided view of the world. Sylvia's life is deliberately depressing in every nook and cranny, from her relentless job - where most of her ostensible "friends" work - and even to her own bedroom, both settings stripped entirely of warm colors resulting in a dingy palette loaded with cold blues and grays. You would also be hard-pressed to find an instance of Theron smiling during her gripping and unrelenting portrayal, one that requires her to lay bare the conventions of the movie star in the same way she did for Monster (2003). Basinger plays her mirror image, a woman who has more structure to her life but who suffers from the same inner anxiety, physically manifested in the constant glaze of sweat that covers her skin. The New Mexico desert she frequently inhabits becomes a barren nothing, grim for its muted colors, detached compositions (courtesy of There Will be Blood cinematographer Robert Elswit) and the double-crossing, eventually horrific events that take place there.

Instead of providing comic relief, Arriaga takes pauses between dramatic longeurs with streams of nondescript imagery. Ultimately, this is what separates Arriaga and Iñárritu directorially, and what gives The Burning Plain more of a calmer, contemplative tone. Arriaga's camera will settle on a pack of black birds lifting off from the ground, or an empty plain situated between two mountains. Yet its atmosphere is stifling, tinged with the feeling of inevitable tragedy caused by a lava flow of troubling choices that the character's make. The film has so far received horrid critical reviews, but they seem to be missing this calculated mood. While Arriaga may be having a fun time jostling the audience around narratively, the effect is actually quite appropriate for a film dealing with regrets and claustrophobic lifestyles, of actions being the result of selfishness rather than compassion for others.

Los Muertos (2004) A Film by Lisandro Alonso

The New Argentine Cinema has been thriving in recent years, and the most exciting newcomer is undoubtedly Lisandro Alonso. After his debut film La Libertad in 2001, which began a trilogy of poetic realist works, Alonso has made a name for himself on the festival circuit. Los Muertos - the second film in this loose "trilogy" - is certainly no easy endeavor, but through its lush longueurs and aural delights, it creates a tranquil atmosphere of unease that periodically reveals arduous metaphors that Alonso allows you to take or leave. If one engages with the former, the film is a disturbingly affecting "road movie" that takes fundamental genre conventions (a path towards freedom or absolution, pushing aside the past in favor of the future...) and conceals them to startling effect.

Rural folk, the underprivileged, and "simple" people, have been on the forefront of Alonso's mind throughout his career, and they are a direct influence on his stories and characters. Los Muertos specifically concerns Argentino Vargas (who also plays the main character in his third film, Fantasma), a manual laborer who determinedly took the leading role despite his complete lack of acting experience. Vargas - who indeed plays a man named Vargas in the story - is what Lee Kang-Sheng is to Tsai Ming-Liang, and what Anne Wiazemsky was briefly for Robert Bresson: a personal, under-the-radar performer whose existence in these unique works is so plausible that it almost goes entirely unnoticed. In fact, Bresson would likely give Vargas' dull corporeity in Los Muertos' his greatly admired stamp of approval. Vargas embodies an upper middle-aged man imprisoned for (as we are discreetly informed) the murder of his two brothers. The film's hushed, floating opening frames perhaps imply this, and so does a point towards the middle of the film when a man explicitly asks Vargas about the murder, to which he mutters with forgetfulness. His character is mysterious and self-contained, almost stubbornly becalmed even, yet withholds a virility that is on shocking display when his actions become wholly uninhibited (such as in a protracted shot of his routine slaughter of a young goat at riverside, or his immediate and casual sexual encounter with a prostitute).

The first few chapters of the film show Vargas being released from prison (few formalities are shown in this exoneration, what matters to Alonso is the state of his protagonist as reflected by this crucial change in environment) and directed out into the Argentinian jungle with a canoe in a seemingly motiveless trip to see his daughter. Vargas' travel downriver is the poetic monument of the film; the canoe, the chirping jungle, and the river could all be taken as symbols for Vargas' isolated behavior during his transformation, one that includes a hope for salvation and an apparent denial of his past. However, Alonso offers no help, crafting a film that is one dynamic throughout. There are no scenes that necessarily stand out dramatically, nor are there ever moments of overly prolonged tedium; Alonso prefers his long, painterly images to evoke a rhythmic, transcendent, yet oddly realistic quality. Los Muertos comes to an unexpected halt in its final frame, and with its thought-provoking use of two dropped children's toys on the dirt beside two swaying fabric sheets, it may suggest Vargas as a fetishistic killer (shades of Angelopoulos' Landscape in the Mist, in which a similar composition deals with unseen malice). However, nothing can be taken as fact in this enigmatic film by Lisandro Alonso.