Rejtman is a whimsical auteur, and La Practica is no exception to this. His flawed characters negotiate the pitfalls of modern urban living. Things that can go wrong probably will. Connections will be missed and relationships are likely to be dysfunctional. There’s a dry acerbic humour hovering at the edge of the screen, even where there’s no apparent joke to laugh at. Gustavo is a porteño yoga teacher living in Santiago. He’s getting divorced from his Chilean wife, another yoga teacher, but determined to stick it out in the city rather than return home. His job gets harder when he does his knee in and becomes an inflexible yoga teacher. The film drifts through his life with him, as he deals with divorce, meets ex-students, tries to recover. The action is minor scale and affectionately comic. Gustavo is played by Esteban Bigliardi, who played a similar character in Rodrigo Moreno’s Los Delinquentes. There are other echoes to Moreno’s film, with Gustavo experiencing some kind of epiphany when he spends an earthquake night outside in an Andes forest. The juxtaposition between ‘the natural world’ and the urban world perhaps opening a space of personal reconciliation for the protagonist. This feels like an axiomatic southern cone tension: what does the wilderness have to teach us in a world where the city delivers a tenuous and unsatisfactory security?
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