De la Noche a la Mañana is a movie about getting lost. In this case Ignacio, a Porteño architect, finds himself dazed and confused in Valparaiso, where he goes ostensibly to give a talk on modern architectural trends. His reasons for going feels slightly contrived: two students approach him at the end of a class he gives in Buenos Aires saying they were in touch a while ago and on the basis of this and nothing else he leaves his newly pregnant wife, paying his own to Valparaiso where he discovers the uni has been occupied by the students, no-one knows anything about his proposed talk and the two female students who invited him are nowhere to be found. He proceeds to have a lost weekend in Valparaiso, where he is robbed, offered a life-changing job and seduced by a younger teacher from the uni who offers him a place to crash. Tonally there’s a lot to like about the film’s dry humour and the way in which the hangdog character of Ignacio is developed. However, the narrative starts to feel as though it turns into something of a shaggy dog story about half way through. Nothing very bad is going to happen to Ignacio and nothing very exciting either. The film’s dry depiction of university life has something in common with Santiago Mitre’s El Estudiante and its depiction of an Argentine lost in the wilds of South America (although Valparaiso is not that remote a place to get lost) felt reminiscent of Santiago Loza’s La Paz. The role of the architect in Latin America is also a fascinating one, with the tremulous relationship between urban and natural environments which the film explores in Ignacio’s opening seminar. But having laid a foundation, setting the story up for an earthquake to strike, the film then seems reluctant to confront the possibility that any real harm could ever come to its forlorn protagonist.
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