saturdays disorders (w&d lucia seles)

Seles’ films have been feted in Cinemateca this week, a retrospective for a filmmaker who makes films on their own terms, patchwork assemblages of video and narrative. Part bricolage, part home movies, Saturdays Disorders has the feeling of an intense comedy psychodrama as found footage, an offering from a state at the edge of the accepted cinema rules. In its wilful idiosyncrasy and elaborate architectural vision (this film belongs to a tetralogy) it feels like the work of a vaulting Borgesian ambition to reinvent film with nothing more than a manic will and a digital camera.

The film itself melds two narratives. One is the arrangement of a tennis match, the only match of a tennis tournament, organised by a group of friends for no apparent reason. The other is the tale of one of those friends, called Lujan, who is coming to meet these friends, in a city called Lujan, but for reasons that are never quite clear, she is in a state of heightened anxiety and ends up patrolling the streets of the city, desperately searching for a church which might or might not be a point of rendezvous, leaving increasingly unhinged voice messages as she goes. The two stories are jemmied together, and the film as a whole feels as though it has been edited on speed, with a frenetic, semi-associative style, held together by Lujan’s odyssey and the anti-climax of the tennis match.

Whether Seles is Seles or Graf is hard to discern. The freedom the filmmaker has in setting their own aesthetic and narrative agenda gives the film energy, (even a “propulsive” energy, to use the word supplied to me in notes on a UK project), but the film also relies to an extent on accepting that the audience are in on the joke, with no attempt to give us any emotional hooks to cling to. Lujan is desperate, we don’t know why, it’s kind of funny, it’s all done on a shoestring, but where’s the beef? One of the curious things about Saturdays Disorders are the glimpses it offers at the edge of the frame of ordinary people going about their business in an Argentina on the point of implosion - a market outside a cathedral, a collection of people offering directions on a street corner. The ordinariness is in contrast to the slightly chummy activities of the group setting up the tennis match, obsessed by their own cruel particularity.