Naishtat’s early film is a stark, Haneke-esque dissection of a society teetering on the brink. How does the medium represent fear? The jagged edit and mash-up of naturalism with stylised moments make for an unsettling watch. The film follows various characters who either or live or work on a private housing estate on the edge of Buenos Aires. The lives of these characters are portrayed through short scenes, like vignettes, with no obvious narrative through line. An elderly home help who collapses as she vacuums. The alarm from one of the houses on the estate sounds for no reason, and the security guard goes to investigate. The alarm stops sounding, but the security guard doesn’t reappear. People are trapped in lifts, the electricity is erratic, strangers throw rubbish into people’s lush gardens, wild dogs roam free. The edge of darkness is menacingly close, so much so that at one point all the lights go out and the characters and audience are left in the dark. The film maintains a steady, grounded pace and tone, in contrast to the melodrama of the title. The narrative is a patchwork which slowly coalesces towards a finale that hints at terror. Argentinian cinema since the turn of the millennium has forged a rich, acerbic path, and Naishtat is a welcome addition to the canon. The duality between a society which recognises itself as both progressive and impoverished, European and American, ‘third world’ and ‘first’, generates tensions which create narratives unafraid of walking up to the cliff edge of the technological society which permits cinema to exist, and peering over the edge to see what it looks like on the other side. The closing frames of History of Fear, where the director has the actors assume faces representing states of emotion, including fear, perfectly expresses the boundaries of cinema’s capacity to capture these realities.
No comments:
Post a Comment