puan (w&d maría alché, benjamín naishtat)

Puan is a comedy, and yet it was surprisingly moving to be watching this film which encapsulates so much that is vibrant and alive about the country it comes from, in the week that the elections delivered victory for someone who would appear to be violently opposed to everything the film represents. In which other country would a film be made, featuring some of its biggest stars, which is a comedy about philosophy professors? Where swathes of the film would be given over to dialogue about Hobbes, Plato, Rousseau and Kant and yet has the audacity to conclude with the recitation of a tango?

Naishtat, working here in partnership with María Alché, has moved away from the dark tone of his early work to embrace something warmer, more engaging, presumably more commercial. At the heart of the film is the paunchy middle-aged philosophy professor, Marcelo Pena , played by Marcelo Subiotto, a wilfully unsuitable protagonist, nervous and shy, who only comes into his own in the classroom. He is nearly eclipsed by a barnstorming performance from Leonardo Sbaraglia as Marcelo’s nemesis, the pretentious but brilliant Rafael Sujarchuk. This tension between the two makes for some great comedy, even if this is only one aspect of what is a communal film, peopled by the range of characters who feature in Marcelo’s life. There is a narrative thread, which revolves around which of the two will become head of faculty, even though the result seems a foregone conclusion, but the filmmakers seem less interested in the nuances of narrative and more concerned with constructing space to linger in this particular world where ideas still have agency; a world which is under existential threat.

A threat that is even more vigente today, long after the business of making the film has been concluded. The writers presumably had no way of knowing that the recent election would lead to the arrival of someone who wants to scrap the Ministry of Education altogether, handing it over lock stock and barrel to the private sector. The real-life defenders of Kant, Rousseau et al do indeed face being thrown out on the street, and under Milei’s new government’s strictures, they could face incarceration for seeking to protest. As such the film’s resolution feels eerily prophetic.