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.

history of fear (w&d benjamín naishtat)

Naishtat’s early film is a stark, Haneke-esque dissection of a society teetering on the brink. How does the medium represent fear? The jagged edit and mash-up of naturalism with stylised moments make for an unsettling watch. The film follows various characters who either or live or work on a private housing estate on the edge of Buenos Aires. The lives of these characters are portrayed through short scenes, like vignettes, with no obvious narrative through line. An elderly home help who collapses as she vacuums. The alarm from one of the houses on the estate sounds for no reason, and the security guard goes to investigate. The alarm stops sounding, but the security guard doesn’t reappear. People are trapped in lifts, the electricity is erratic, strangers throw rubbish into people’s lush gardens, wild dogs roam free. The edge of darkness is menacingly close, so much so that at one point all the lights go out and the characters and audience are left in the dark. The film maintains a steady, grounded pace and tone, in contrast to the melodrama of the title. The narrative is a patchwork which slowly coalesces towards a finale that hints at terror. Argentinian cinema since the turn of the millennium has forged a rich, acerbic path, and Naishtat is a welcome addition to the canon. The duality between a society which recognises itself as both progressive and impoverished, European and American, ‘third world’ and ‘first’, generates tensions which create narratives unafraid of walking up to the cliff edge of the technological society which permits cinema to exist, and peering over the edge to see what it looks like on the other side. The closing frames of History of Fear, where the director has the actors assume faces representing states of emotion, including fear, perfectly expresses the boundaries of cinema’s capacity to capture these realities. 

rojo (w&d benjamin naishtat)

Rojo is a baroque, offbeat movie about fascism. Although you might almost never know. It focuses on a small town lawyer, Claudio, who is comfortable in his provincial world, until one day a crazy man comes into his local restaurant and accosts him, before later shooting himself in the head, in front of Claudio and his wife. Claudio takes his body and ditches it in the desert. 

There’s a kind of rumbling plot about whether Claudio’s action will be discovered and whether he’s guilty of anything really. An eccentric Chilean TV detective gets on the case, which puts the wind up Alfredo, but this is 1975 and the military coup is coming and fairly soon its going to be considered to be more or less legitimate to take out subversives without having to account for one’s actions. 

This sense of creeping lawlessness is what underpins Naishtat’s film. He’s fascinated by the way in which polite society welcomes the breakdown of the rule of law, which permits both authoritarianism and corruption. Claudio gets involved in a scam to steal a house which has been left vacant by political victims of the state. A young man is kidnapped and disappeared by Claudio’s daughter’s jealous boyfriend. Everything starts to unravel. 

The film presents a world right on the edge of a delirious insanity, where the light of day is eclipsed not by darknesss, but by an infra-red parallel reality, with perception warped into something out of a science-fiction film. (Literally in one sequence) What’s telling is that even those who stand to benefit from the arriving military coup are also profoundly unsettled by it, their world tilted off its axis, with any kind of madness now posited and possible. Fascism is a false prophet: the myth of order it disseminates might be popular, but it turns out to be deeply troubling for your state of mind and catastrophic for your sanity.