ostende (w&d laura citarella)

Ostende is a masterclass in how to make your debut. The film is predicated on the quiet charm of its protagonist, Laura Paredes. Staying at the eponymous off-season balneario, she observes what she believes is a conspiracy evolving between three of the other guests, an older man and two younger women. This gives the film a Hitchcockian guile, a hook to anchor the film’s quiet observations and gentle humour. As is so often the case with the films from the Pampero stable, there are elements of the shaggy dog story to the narrative. The journey is more important than the destination, even if this is to a certain extent belied by the film’s final sequence. The story Paredes constructs in her head about her fellow guests is echoed by a story for a film that one of the hotel staff tells her, a tale that promises darkness, violence and mystery, but is no more than a first act. The presence of a John Le Carré book which Paredes is reading reinforces the idea that the audience is watching a spy movie, searching for clues along with the protagonist. But the film also makes it clear that in this sense the cinematic thriller is a game, played between audience and director. The director’s role is to keep the audience guessing, which is also a way of keeping them awake and alive, as we try to decipher what the hell this all means.

There’s probably a more complex essay to be written about how this tallies with a Rioplatense consciousness, with its echoes of the oeuvres of Borges, Saer, Cortazar, Onetti among others. The ludic power of art. Maybe one day I, or another me, will get round to writing it. Meanwhile it was fascinating in the post-show talk to hear how the director was prepared to return and film another scene even after the film had premiered at BAFICI. The dexterity of the Pampero aesthetic is matched by the flexibility of their shooting methods. Ostende possesses a freshness predicated on its constant willingness to surprise, even if that surprise is a five minute sequence where someone narrates a film which will never get made. There’s the constant sense that you, along with the protagonist, have no real idea what is going to happen next, and that just makes you all the more anxious to find out, even if the subsequent discovery proves anti-climactic. Cinema becomes a maze full of dead ends and wrong turns, but there’s something fundamentally active and pleasurable contained within the frustrating process of navigating this labyrinth.