palo y hueso (w&d nicolás sarquís, w. raúl beceyro, juan josé saer)

Palo y Hueso (Stick and Bone) is a low-fi, casi nouvelle vague tale from rural Argentina. Besides being an intriguing film in its own right, it has the added kudos of being adapted from a story by the great Argentine novelist Saer, who is credited as co-writer. There’s something about harsh tales from the countryside which suit that a Chabrolian black and white aesthetic (thinking of Sanjines and Paolo Costa, among others.) Palo y Hueso tells a simple story of an older campesino, Don Arce, who ‘buys’ himself a fifteen year old wife. He also happens to have a good-looking twenty-something son, Domingo, who lives with him. It comes as no great surprise that Rosita is more interested in Domingo than Don Arce. One of the more surprising elements of the film is the way in which the agent of change turns out to be Rosita, rather than either of the men. Although she finds herself in a weak position, she emerges as a strong character, prepared to take charge of her life. The film is threaded through with images of the local culture and landscape. The riotous festivities of the local pueblo contrast with the emptiness of country life. All of it is captured by a camera which feels as though it is constantly probing the slim tale’s possibilities, employing depth of field in the manner of Bergman, another who enjoyed putting the passions and bleakness of rural life on screen. 

los chicos y la calle (d carlos echeverría)

In 2001 Argentina and Uruguay suffered a brutal economic collapse. Kids that grew up in that era are sometimes called here, los chicos del pasto, the kids who ate grass. Made during this recession, Echeverría’s documentary looks at the street kids of Buenos Aires. It is orientated around a refuge, called CAINA, where the kids go for food, clothing and shelter, run by willing young men and women with clear social consciences. The doc has a Wiseman feel, albeit interrupted at times with interviews. The kids roam the streets near Retiro. The film captures the humanity behind their hard facade. No-one finds themselves living on the street without a story that explains how they got there. Kids that most would walk past or shy away from become people in their own right. The camera roams the streets with them, listens in on their stories, a testament to the trust the director and his crew managed to engender. Below the surface there lurk tales of sexual abuse and violence. It’s impossible not to contemplate what has happened to these lost children twenty five years on, now that those who have survived will be adults entering middle age. 

nuestra tierra (w&d lucrecia martel, w maría alché)

Martel deviates into doc. Nuestra Tierra is a rangy documentary which looks, as the title suggests, at the issue of the land, who owns it, who has rights. The location is Tucuman, the northern province of Argentina. Northern Argentina has a far larger native or indigenous population than other parts of the country. One of the notable aspects of Martel’s documentary is the way it makes explicit how little representation this element of society has within the general Argentine audio-visual world. The film revolves around a dispute over land rights in a valley which the indigenous Chuschagasta population claim they have always inhabited, which several white families now claim ownership of. This lead to a clash between the local indigenous population and three men of caucasian descent which ended with shots being fired and one indigenous man dying. The film is loosely weaved around the subsequent court case, brought by the relatives of the dead men. There was one pointed moment in the cinema when an academic opines that there are no official rastros (traces) of Chuschagasta in the valley. Rastros can also mean features, and Martel juxtaposes the academic’s words with the faces of the Chuschagasta who are present at the trial. The irony of the academic’s negationist argument was not lost on the Cinemateca audience.

The film seeks to both relate the dramatic events of the confrontation, of which there is grainy footage, and also to recount the stories of many of the inhabitants of the valley. It is an object lesson in a non-netflix method of storytelling. It resists sensationalism, preferring to dwell on the complex history of the region and its inhabitants, shifting from courtroom drama to archeological/ sociological study. There is no dominant central character. The viewer is encouraged to immerse themselves in this valley, to walk through its ravines, to gaze at the wild horses, to listen to the memories of the elders. In so doing, Martel creates an important document about discrimination and the inequities of Argentine society.  

dengue boy (michel nieva, tr. rahul bery)

Dengue Boy belongs to that fin-de-siècle genre, the video game novel. I don’t get to read that many of them, but it reminded me of Pelevin, and I imagine William Gibson, (who I’ve never read). The virtual reality novel, where characters plug into worlds within worlds. Neva makes an explicit reference to Borges towards the end of the book, (The Aleph), suggesting a larger genealogy to the genre, and perhaps it might also be said to reference back to Huxley, Swift, More, etcetera. The invention of imaginary parallel worlds has always been the stuff of fiction. The technological gizmos of high capitalism only serve to garnish another layer of accessibility to these worlds.

Neva’s dystopian text is set in a futuristic climate-warmed hothouse world where concepts like cold are a thing of the past, only existing in expensive reproductions for obscenely wealthy tourists who travel to an ice-free Antarctica for a taste of something they have heard of in folk tales. The world is afflicted by giant mutant mosquitos which are capable of laying waste to everything in their path, spreading disease, death and destruction in their wake. These diseases are then monetised, as the bio-industry produces profitable vaccines to counter them. The reference to Covid 19 is implicit. In amongst the catastrophe porn, Neva invents a new sub-genre of mosquito splatter-gore. That the novel is Argentine is perhaps surprising, with its playful reimagining of Argentine geography post the rise in seal-levels which has liquidated Buenos Aires and the coast. Above and beyond the politics, the mash-up of ideas and excess seems to echo the trajectory of contemporary Argentina and its current Dengue Boy president. 

the literary conference (césar aira)

As ever one isn’t quite sure what to make of Aira’s fiendish mind. Is it that of a genius or a madman? This story involves, among things, cloning Octavio Paz and his tie, pirate’s loot, a lecherous writer, big blue worms. All of which occurs at a Venezuelan literary festival. It’s dotty, but it also feels calculated, in the way that extreme improvisation needs to be underpinned by an unlikely coherence. It’s reminiscent of Saer, rather than Borges, lacking the blind man’s love of logic. It’s also reminiscent of Aira’s cinematic compatriot Lucia Seles, another who comes from a small town on the edge of Buenos Aires, with his roundabout tales that engage but infuriate. There’s a fine line between madness, the artistic equivalent of scratching an itch until  you bleed, and otherworldly genius, which the margins of Argentina’s capital seem to provoke. Bolaño describes Aira as one of the best Hispanic writers of his generation in the introduction, and who are we to argue with Bolaño?

our share of the night (mariana enriquez, tr. megan mcdowell)

I tend to steer clear of writing here about anything with which I have a personal connection. I wouldn’t say Mariana Enriquez and I are great mates, but we did sit and have a coffee together a few weeks back and there’s the small issue of spending years adapting a short story of hers for the screen, which might become a thing one day, and might not. I actually began reading Our Share of the Night whilst waiting outside the Solis to go to a talk of hers. All of which means to say that I am steeped in mundo Enriquez, one way or another, and cannot claim my normal objectivity, if such a thing exists. I also seem to remember her saying that the novel was not that well received when it was published in the UK. It has taken me over a month to get through it. It’s a weighty text with grand ambitions, which sometimes feels as though it’s going around the houses, of Buenos Aires, La Plata or London. However, going round the houses is also one of its strengths. This is a book that deals with the occult, that deals with spaces or houses that can only be accessed with occult knowledge, and the terrifying things that happen therein. There are moments when Enriquez makes clear her literary and poetic antecedents: she is writing in a tradition of investigation of the world which might exist on the other side of our consciousness. One where the immortals wield a scabrous power, one that the rich and powerful would happily kill to access. 

el jockey (w&d luis ortega, w. fabian casas, rodolfo palacios)

El Jockey, an easily translatable title, is perhaps a marmite film. Stylish, driven as much by its art design as any real sense of narrative, Ortega constructs his movie out of striking images and Roy Andersson-esque sequences. A roomful of female jockeys cavort. A broken figure is swallowed up by a military band. A racehorse races against a Dodge driven by a gaucho. And so ond so forth There is much artistry on display and the film’s opening sequences are arresting, but as it becomes clear that the narrative is essentially a paint-by-numbers job, its charm perhaps begins to wear off. Or perhaps not. Andersson is just one reference here, but just this year I have seen films by Cocteau and Parajanov, where the visual stimuli is prioritised over narrative, or perhaps it might be truer to say that narrative has been employed as a means of transmitting image. Ortega’s film with its use of colour and cliche might be said to belong to this tradition: a feast for the eyes which uses arbitrary narrative connections to bind these images together. At times it feels like advertising: albeit advertising which promotes nothing so much as the director’s personal flair. 

la práctica (w&d martín rejtman)

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?

copacabana (d. martin rejtman)

Rejtman’s documentary addresses the wave of Bolivian immigration to Buenos Aires. This relationship between Bolivia and Argentina is at once close and distant. Spanish is the lingua franca between the two countries and the north of Argentina which borders Bolivia is, culturally, similar. But Bolivians retain a fierce identity in their music, dress and traditions which marks them apart. There has been a steady stream of immigration from the Andean country to Buenos Aires. A Bolivian man shows his almanac with photos of an early Bolivian community established there in the sixties. Rejtman films in Bolivia, Buenos Aires and, in the closing sequence, on the border. It’s an observational doc, made of long sequences which show Bolivians dancing or processing. The complexities of immigration aren’t addressed: this feels like a Porteño spying on a secret world that exists within his city. There could be said to be a cross-reference here to the Bolivian labourers in César Aira’s novel, Ghosts. The distance which the camera imposes means that its subjects remain mysterious, semi-alien beings, walking the streets but carrying a different flame in their chests.

el viento que arrasa (w&d paula hernández, w. leonel d’agostino)

Hernandez’ film opens with a great set piece as the lay preacher/ evangelist, Alfredo Castro, does his stuff in a rural backwater. His daughter, Lena, is the one who looks after him and runs the show. They are an oddball team and given the daughter is reaching an age when she’s more interested in boys than god, we know they’re heading for trouble. Trouble arrives when they break down and find themselves holed up in the ramshackle hillbilly hideaway of mechanic Gringo and his disfigured teenage son. Everything is bubbling up, but at this point the narrative stalls somewhat, trapped like the characters in an endless afternoon in the back of beyond.

clorindo testa. (w&d mariano llinás)

WTF is Clorindo Testa? If you don’t know beforehand, you’re not likely to emerge from Llinás’ film much the wiser. In a similar vein to Citarella’s Las Poetas Visitan a Juana Bignozzi, also from the Pampero stable, the director uses the commission of a film about the Argentine architect as a vehicle to interrogate the very idea of the documentary biopic, stripping out most of the bio in the process. The result is playful, frustrating, laugh-out-loud funny, and inevitably polarising. People come to the film to find out about Clorindo Testa, and leave either dazzled or ennervated by Llinás and his Rioplatense playfulness. It may be an acquired taste (but then so is cinema these days, and documentaries even more so), but there’s something enchanting about Llinás’ determination to go against the grain. When he shows the work-in-progress to friends and ex-wife, the ubiquitous Laura Paredes, they criticise him for making a film about himself, whilst he lurks at the back of the shot, raising his eyebrows. It’s all very arch, very offbeat, but it’s also great to see someone being given plata and taking the attitude that he’s going to do what he wants with it, even when everyone is telling him he’s in the wrong. In a medium that is so much formed by the compromise of artistic vision and the importance of treading a populist line, Llinás and Pampero remain a shining light on behalf of maverick self-indulgent genius. 

forgotten manuscript/ ultimas noticias de la escritura (w. sergio chejfec, tr. jeffery lawrence)

Chejfec’s fiction has a dry charm and this non-fiction essay about the nature of writing in the pre and post digital age employs a similar tone. Broken up into 27 sections, the writer analyses the meaning of writing itself. Does a note in the margin of a book then become part of that book? Does reading a book on a screen alter the reader’s reception of said book to reading it on the page? How does the material consumption of a text affect interpretation? The book (which I read as a digital copy) poses all these and many more Barthesian questions, whilst permitting itself regular nods in the direction of the paterfamilias of Argentine literature, Borges. 

trenque lauquen (w&d citarella, w. laura paredes)

There’s a monster in Trenque, which the protagonist, Laura wants to see. She’s told she can’t see it, but she can listen to it. She strains at the door to hear, and what she hears, along with us, is the sound of the monster breathing. Which seems wholly appropriate for a film which relishes its capacity to breathe. Rather than being measured in minutes or story beats, it might be measure in breaths, the breaths the characters take as they try to work out what’s happening, and we take alongside them.

Trenque Lauquen has garnered critical plaudits and global recognition for Citarella. Its genesis as part of the Pampero stable is evident, with Llinas credited as a collaborator. At nearly five hours long, it is in the vein of Historias Minimas and La Flor, films where the director worked as a producer. All of which goes some way to explain the surefooted way her magnum opus handles the challenge of filling so much screen time so artfully. It’s almost as though a parallel version of cinema has been quietly evolving in the province of Buenos Aires, one which has no fear of taxing the audience’s attention span, something which is such a concern in other parts of the world. Because Trenque isn’t just long, it also revels in its longeurs, even down to the modes of dialogue, where the Pinteresque pause is employed to full and touching effect.

The film is divided into twelve parts, each of which has its own distinctive flavour, sometimes, as in Spregelburd’s part, defined by the acting, and sometimes defined by the mood. In her talk following the screening of Ostende, a film she said was shaped as a mash-up between Rohmer and Hitchcock, the director said that Trenque is a conversation with at least eight directors. Hitchcock might be there again, along with Antonioni, using the trope of the lady who vanishes, and the end felt as though it might be a nod to Varda’s Vagabonde. The multiplicity of influences and tones, another thing that more conventional filmmaking tends to be wary of, actually helps to define the aesthetic of Trenque Lauquen: it is many things at once, always predicated on a mystery. The mystery of the poetess, the mystery of the creature, the mystery of the missing protagonist. These hooks are enough to constantly engage the audience, and maintain the film’s rhythm: we’re not that bothered how long it takes, in fact, the drawn out nature of the quest if anything adds to our enjoyment. This is cinema operating like a sprawling novel, where the detours and distractions are part of the pleasure. 

las poetas visitan a juana bignozzi (dir. laura citarella, mercedes halfon)

The Poetesses visit Juana Bignozzi, to translate the title into English, is a lovingly crafted documentary co-helmed by Citarella with Halfon, a writer, poetess and critic. Halfon has been entrusted with the papers of the titular poetess, a formidable woman and a wonderful poet. The film offers a loving introduction to Bignozzi’s work, but more than this, it is also delightfully self-referential, asking the question of to what extent a film can ever truly represent a subject like poetry, or a poet(ess). The tension between directors is noted, with Citarella more preoccupied with these questions, whilst Halfon is engaged in the more prosaic task of paying homage to Bignozzi. There are two main areas where their approaches coincide. Firstly, with the more Bolañoesque elements of Bignozzi’s story: she spent thirty years living abroad, and the contents of this time in her life remain mysterious. She was married, but travelled extensively; in the dense forest of photographic memories left behind, many of the figures who appear are unknown and appear untraceable. There’s something of The Savage Detectives about all of this, as well as the spy narratives which Citarella loves: a fortuitous touch is the way that in a doc filmed about Bignozzi when she was still alive, there’s a sign which says in Spanish - From Russia with Love - outside the block of flats she lived in. Secondly, their approaches coincide in ultimately letting the poetry do the talking, (even if the director has to ask the question: which version of the reading is the best one to use? Is it better (more truthful) to get actors to read or not?). The final section of the film is given over entirely to the poems, although even here there’s a dialectic between sound and image, with the poems being presented both through being read and via the text itself appearing on screen. 

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. 

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. 

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.

lucio flavio (w&d héctor babenco, w. jorge durán, josé louzeiro)

Lucio Flavio, an early film by the lauded Argentine director, is a crime thriller, based on a true story, mostly set in Rio. This Rio of the seventies feels amazingly evocative, the men in flares and open long-sleeved shirts, drinking cold beers whenever they can. You can feel the heat and the sweat oozing through the screen, something complemented by the judicious use of long-shots when we see the street in all its dusty glory, with Lucio, the anti-hero, on his way to his next robbery or about to be busted. The film is based on the way that a police death squad used criminals for its own corrupt ends. Lucio knows he’s a dead man walking, but it doesn’t stop him walking with a strut, embracing his destiny, a strangely heroic figure in a tawdry world. The remarkable thing about Babenco’s film is the way in which it shows a society that has changed so little. A strange quirk of this blog is that for some reason, the 2007 Brazilian film, Elite Squad, is by far the most viewed review, (obviously as a result of some kind of strange algorithm), and Lucio Flavio is a clear predecessor to Padilha’s blockbuster, with both films revealing the baroque arrangements between the police and the underworld, as the police seek to muscle in on the streets which belong to the criminals. Babenco directs with flair, using occasional dream sequences to lend colour to the prosaic events. Whilst in some ways a generic crime flick, Lucio Flavio also infiltrates a sly commentary on the torture and summary executions carried out by the dictatorships of the time, and as such was a way for Babenco to comment on events in his native country in a way that the censors would never have permitted if the commentary hadn’t been smuggled in under the guise of a crime film. It’s a fine example of the way in which the codes of cinema permit a discourse which is more wide reaching that the apparent subject matter, as well as offering a telling insight into a lost Brazilian decade. 

ghosts (césar aira, tr chris andrews)

Ghosts is another of those slight, elliptical novels that the Argentines seem to specialise in. Apparently Aira has written more than 80 novels, his name is ubiquitous in this part of the world, but I had never read him. Ghosts has the feel of having been written in a few sessions. It’s a disconnected novel, which starts by focussing on one character, a teenage boy, then shifts focus to his female teenage cousin, Patri. Both are part of an extended Chilean family who have moved to Buenos Aires, where the men work in the construction of a luxury tower block with a swimming pool on the roof.  The family lives in the building as it is built, but will have to move out when it’s completed. There is one added complication: the building is haunted by masculine ghosts who wander around in the nude and have no qualms about being seen. They take a liking to Patri, inviting her to a party, although she can only come if she’s dead.

Aira appears to be touching on at least three themes in the novel: the immigrants who arrive in Buenos Aires to work in industries like construction; the expansion of the city as old barrios are replaced by anodyne tower blocks, and lastly, the ghosts themselves hint, inescapably, at the disappeared from the dictatorship. The extent to which these themes coalesce is perhaps debatable; at times it feels as though the weight of these subtexts sits uneasily within the architecture of the novel. 

los delinquentes (w&d rodrigo moreno)

Moreno’s lauded film has echoes of what would probably be described as Lo Ola Nueva, if more attention was paid globally to some of the remarkable cinema emerging from Argentina over the course of the past decade or so. This movement is headlined by Mariano Llinás, Santiago Mitre and Laura Citarella, but it is a generous and expansive community, one of whose key figures, Laura Paredes, has a small role in Moreno’s film. The movement, which would probably never recognise itself as such, is a broad church, but there is the sense of a unifying aesthetic, in the way it riffs off a skewed naturalism and a willingness to embrace a circuitous (and often drawn-out) form of storytelling, which holds little regard for the dictums of the script gospels.

At three hours, with the film self-consciously dividing itself into two parts, Los Delinquentes swims in this slipstream. Its meandering narrative starts in classic genre fashion, as Morán, a disillusioned bank employee, seizes his chance to effect a robbery. He then manages to drag the unwitting Román in as an accomplice, after the fact. However, the film soon moves beyond recognisable genre traits. Morán hands himself in, as Ramón tries to cope with the stress of his involvement. The action moves from Buenos Aires to the rural hills of the Cordoba countryside. Both men inadvertently fall in love with the same woman, further complicating things. As it evolves, the film feels like a meditation on city versus countryside, on the values of the working life, on the unattainable nature of happiness. All of this is processed in a leisurely fashion, with the narrative, charged by the dramatic punch of Morán’s initial theft, slowly unwinding like a spring which is loosing its kinetic power.

It’s intriguing seeing the film on the same day as the presidential debate in Argentina, a debate between a crazy maverick and a company man. Argentina appears to be a country which exists in a state of permanent economic crisis, although when you visit, this is barely noticeable. In a sense, Morán and Ramón’s theft of a lovingly filmed suitcase full of dollars, the camera lingering over the wads of bills as they are stacked and counted like something out of The Italian Job, ends up feeling like a Macguffin. The money is far less important, for both men, than the journey they go on as a result of their actions. The impulse to resolve our human problems through the acquisition of dollars is an illusory one. The wild yonder, with all its promise and beauty, is out there no matter what. In the same way, the film’s inconclusive denouement, threatening a conflict which is never realised, seems to be arguing that our cinematic need for narrative resolutions is also delusional: there’s nothing wrong with sitting through three hours just to find out that there is no ending, just an endless morass of verdant hills.