Reviews

Corazón de Jesús (2004) the third film by Bolivian director Marcos Loayza.

There were moments of hilarity as elements common to many countries whose economic development is stifled by the long arms of bureaucracy: the "mordidas" or bribes that Jesús, who works at the ministry of finance accepts willingly; the random shuffling of papers that can change the course of a life, the inefficiency of hospitals, the frustration in dealing with insurance companies.

In many ways this was an excellent film: it doesn't moralize - in fact,the protagonist (with whom we identify profoundly) has only dubious moral standards: he is a victim of a society that requires situational ethics - but rather elicits, in laughter, an examination of the Institutions that bind and destroy the average person. The imagery, while not shying away from the realities of "La Paz" which include heart-breaking poverty, does not fixate on these elements. This is not another Latin American movie of social decadence or denouncement. Praise Be!

However, the film's absolute downfall was its attempt to divide, in chapters, with epigraph- like interludes by a less-than-talented "trovador". There was no coherence beyond the poorly sung and repetitive lyrics whose tangential relationship to the themes was extraneous at best, distracting and painfully annoying at worst. The first interlude with the staged singer is bearable, the second leads the viewer to believe that there will be a cleverly worked meshing of realities that will neatly tie the intertwining stories together. By the third the viewer realizes that there is no intention of reconciling these two unrelated spheres and there is a sense of dread as we are forced to listen to the monotonous and imitative voice several more times throughout.

The end of the story is extremely clever but the movie ultimately fails because it closes with the camera fixing on the tomb (for far too long), not of a known character, but of an unrelated, unknown personage, whose pertinence to the story is non-existent. It doesn't close with an air of mystery, but rather leaves the viewer thinking: what was thinking and why did I waste my time?

Here the overall value of the film isn't greater than the sum of its parts but rather lesser for the sum of its parts. That said, if you can ignore the bad musical performance (someone's friend or lover?) the rest was quite enjoyable.

Otra vuelta (2003) Santiago Paravecino Argentina

This feature length black and white film is a slow moving, contemplative attempt at neo- symbolism. I say attempt, it is more like a nine tenths successful film. It was billed as director's first (feature length?) but apparently it was not his first film.

This is a thinly veiled meta-referential piece whose name: "otra vuelta" can be read on multiple levels. On a first level, it refers to the return to the director (cleverly renamed with the same initials) to his hometown of Chacabuco. On a second level, it refers to his addressing the making of a film based on a story by Haroldo Conti, (also of Chacabuco and disappeared, it would seem, in 1976) called "La noche perfumada" whose validity as subject matter is questioned throughout the film by the protagonists various interlocutors. Curiously "Los perfumes de la noche" was a medio-metraje (mid-length film) made in 2002 based on a play by the very same Haroldo Conti and adapted by Santiago Paravecino. In this way the second time around is the return to the subject matter of his previous film. On a third level it can be read as Paravecino's (or his incarnate film double's) following the geographical path of the author Conti, home. And lastly it can be read in the echoing parallels between the story of "La noche perfumada" and the end of the life of his friend who recently committed suicide.

Visually stunning, there is a relatively strong rope of intertwined stories reducing memories to the plane of the ephemeral, reducing art to shreds that explode in the night, but perhaps a few too many loose threads for the film to realize its maximum potential.

Cites the left-behind lover of the recently deceased: "At the end, after it is all over, there are no more images left, only words... or was it the other way around?"

I haven't laughed so hard or enjoyed a movie quite so much as this very bizarre pastiche flick by Canadian Guy Maddin, (notably and unmistakably produced by Atom Egoyan) "The Saddest Music in the World". Based on the screenplay by Kazuo Ishiguro, this is at the pinnacle of postmodern pastiche - think Hartley's "Amateur" meets Cronenberg's "Crash" meets von Triers' "Dancer in the Dark" meets the Coen brothers' "The Man That Wasn't There" or even "Barton Fink". The sense of sadness and desperation that usually accompanies films set in the 1930's was instead replaced by a theater of the absurd and an amateur ethnomusicologist's dream in a soundtrack... There is a sly yet open critique of all that Broadway - read: Hollywood cum US government - is in the world, a heartless money-making remorseless self-indulgent fop, one that ultimately goes up in flames when it destroys everything around itself, (himself). I loved Rosselini as a mastermind cripple and Maria de Medeiros as an amnesiac nymphomaniac... although her version of nymphomania was decidedly tame, but metaphorical for the escapism that current mass-produced media endeavors to present to the brain-washed majority. Sex is purely a physical act of which she partakes as a way to not deal with what she must feel and come to terms with. Meanwhile the hilarious interplay between brothers and a father as sexual rivals is in fact a deeper critique of the disintegration of families that is perhaps more apparent in times of war (read: now) and was primordially sparked precisely by the beginning of the cycle of great wars, when mass international migration began.