User Reviews

This is my favorite Argentinian film from the color era. Pepe Soriano at his best, in a superb acting performance, plays this 'Beto Sanchez': a middle-class man at his forties in the seventies who loses his job, and as he finds out that the society/system has no place for him anymore, he starts a revenge against all kind of institutions which made him undergo all kinds of oppression. As Michael Douglas in "Falling down" (1993), he builds himself as a next-door-(anti?)hero, going against all those things he judges as responsible for his current situation, even killing or at less coerting them. You can keep with the simple story, and you'll have a poor madman who intends to kill the priest, the teacher and the former girlfriend... but if you scratch the surface, you'll find this Olivera's masterpiece: Beto Sanchez does not fight the priest or the teacher, he fights the oppression from the Church and the School -as institutions- over his childhood. With every revenge, Beto Sanchez questions the real necessity for every one of those institutions. He shows the decadence of a Society. He fights against Injustice at its very roots. He does not simply question the "official" institutions as the Army and the Enterprise, he also goes -e.g.- for the unfaithful friendship. Federico Luppi also shines on his brief but essential character. The direction is very good, as the acting and dynamics.