I was informed about the existence of this film by a Welshman I had never met before in a zoom conversation. He told me about the existence of a cult Uruguayan film, about a cult Uruguayan film, neither of which I had ever heard of. Nor had I heard of their directors. The Uruguayan cinema world is inordinately small. It’s very hard not to know or at least be the gym buddy of most people working in the medium, and if you don’t know an individual personally, then you’re sure as hell going to know someone who has fought or slept with or drunk with them. It’s a tight circle, so when the Welshman told me about this film, it sounded apocryphal. However, I did a bit of investigation and discovered the film did indeed exist and an actor I know, Alfonso Tort, was apparently in the movie. Then, in an even more unlikely turn, I was told by an acquaintance who learned I was going to the Sitges film festival that the director was going to be going there too and that he had been sitting at the table with her in a rundown bar on San Jose when our paths had last crossed, a month or so previously.
So I sought this director out and we drank a coffee under the Mediterranean sky and he told me about his movie and said that it would soon be released in Montevideo and we should meet up again there. I returned to Montevideo and his film opened and I went to see it. The film is a wonderful box of tricks, part documentary, part fiction, part Borges fable. It tells the story of a mysterious director who lived in Ciudad Vieja, as do I, and made the cult film, Acto de Violencia en una Joven Periodista, in the 80s. There are clips of the film within the film, images of a Montevideo which doesn’t look so very different to the Montevideo of today, because nothing ever changes here, we are trapped in a clock that never reaches midnight. It is a land of melodramatic films and empty streets, enigmatic clues which lead nowhere, promising change that never materialises.
Directamente para Video captures all this beautifully. It captures, above and beyond the mystery of the film and its absent director, the way that Montevideo is a puzzle which doesn’t want to be solved, in a way that no film I have ever seen has quite managed to do. Most want to capture empty streets and melodrama. But there was no sign of the director. He has vanished into the night. The man sitting at the bar with the producers, who I know, because in the world of Montevideo film, everyone knows everyone, was not the same person, I am sure, as the one I met in Sitges. The director of a film about an absent director has now gone absent himself. Perhaps he has fled to a Borgesian Patagonia, or a Bolaño-esque Catalunya. Perhaps in thirty years someone will be making a film about him, and, should I still be alive, they will come to interview me about that fleeting meeting in Sitges, when the world was still up for grabs.
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