Blend the longeurs of Uru-cine with a dash of Apitchatpong and a soupçon of Doctor Who and you end up with something like Chico Ventana. The tardis in this instance being a squat concrete construction which appears in the Philippines, disconcerting a small village. Meanwhile, Chico is a crewman on a cruise ship off the coast of Patagonia, and Elsa is leading a banal life in my friend’s flat in Montevideo. Somehow all these worlds are connected by a couple of portals (rather than portholes). Why they are connected, to what end, remains opaque. Although, as Snr Amato observed, there’s clearly a Globalisation/ Butterfly Effect subtext. The actions in the Philippine village will determine what happens to the cruise ship which in turn will cause a minor flood in my friend’s flat. Everything connects.
The film felt at its strongest when it observed with a certain acidity other parallel lives, those of the tourists aboard the cruise ship, urged to take a photo of a whale, or dance in the shadow of glaciers. At this point it felt as though there was a subtext to the subtext, something the Montevidean episode might have benefitted from. Likewise the portrayal of the Philippine village, with its gory superstitions, felt slightly done by numbers, for all the charm of the exotic. There’s something about Chico Ventana which gives it the feel of a greater story trying to break out of what ends up being a somewhat solipsistic one, even down to the closing images which justify the film’s extravagant title.
The fact that large swathes of the film take place in my friend Chamorro’s old flat, where we sat and edited and even filmed once, added another level of parallelismo to a story seeking to emphasise the arbitrary connections that may exist in the world. Which also only helped to emphasise the way in which life in Montevideo constantly teeters on the brink of the surreal, a city where fact and fiction are always closer than you might think.
No comments:
Post a Comment