CARANCHO SCAVENGES BAYSIDE

One of my favorite films from 2010 is the Argentine dark thriller Carancho (2010), for which I've already provided a critical overview, as well as an interview with the film's director Pablo Trapero. Strand Releasing has picked up Carancho for distribution and I'm happy to announce that the film opens in the Bay Area March 25, 2010 at Landmark's Lumiere Theatre in San Francisco and Landmark's Shattuck Cinemas in Berkeley. Carancho is also scheduled to open April 8, 2011 at Camera 3 in San Jose.

Landmark's synopsis: "In Argentina, more than 8,000 people die every year in road accidents, with each victim representing millions of pesos in medical and legal expenses. Behind every tragedy, there is an industry. Set in Buenos Aires, the film noir thriller Carancho stars Ricardo Darín (The Secret in Their Eyes) as Sosa, an ambulance-chasing, disbarred attorney with questionable ethics. Luján (Martina Gusman, Lion's Den) is a young doctor from the provinces, trying to make a living out of many jobs. Alone, with a work rhythm that barely allows her to sleep, she tries to establish herself in a city unknown to her. After Luján and Sosa's paths repeatedly cross (she's trying to save a life; he's trying to add another client to his portfolio), the two form an unlikely romance that is threatened by Sosa’s turbulent past. With traffic accidents as the number one cause of deaths in Argentina, bodies are currency, and a black market strives to get rich from the personal tragedies that literally litter the streets."

Cross-published on Twitch.

FIRST PERSON RURAL: THE NEW NONFICTION—Lisandro Alonso On La Libertad

"Film must provide audiences the opportunity to discover questions."—Lisandro Alonso.

When I interviewed programmer Diana Sanchez at the 2010 edition of the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF), she admitted—within the parameters of curatorial taste—her fascination with the appearance of a new genre she was noticing in such films as Pedro González-Rubio's sophomore feature Alamar (To the Sea, 2009), Oscar Ruiz Navia's debut feature Crab Trap (El Vuelco del Cangrejo, 2009), and the films of Lisandro Alonso, José Luis Guerín, and Miguel Gomes; a genre that she described as "a mix of documentary and fiction with a real sense of play between these two forms."

The Pacific Film Archive (PFA) celebrates the appearance and critical popularity of this new documentary-fiction hybrid with their upcoming series "First Person Plural: The New Nonfiction." Jason Sanders observes in his program notes: "In the past decade a new breed of filmmaking has emerged, not quite documentary, fiction, or experimental, but a combination of—or liberation from—all three genres. Lisandro Alonso's La libertad (2001) and Apichatpong Weerasethakul's Blissfully Yours (2002) heralded the beginning of this movement, which, while ranging across years, filmmakers, and continents, still shares several elements: quiet, observational long takes; direct-sound recording; and a 'narrative' that unfolds like a documentary, seemingly just 'happened upon' while the camera was rolling, which is sometimes true, but often false. Tellingly, Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Ilisa Barbash, makers of Sweetgrass (2010), refer to themselves not as 'directors,' but 'recordists'; the concept that reality is merely being recorded, not 'directed,' is key (as is, of course, creating the illusion of this). Most of all, these films share an embrace of a cinema of and for the senses, a way to document and prioritize the natural world through both sight and sound. A pastoral cinema, true, but one that investigates humanity's complicated relationship, or lack thereof, to its environment. This series is largely drawn from the 2010 Flaherty Film Seminar, which considered how film explores work and the agrarian ideal.

"The influences are many: the avant-garde landscape portraits of James Benning; the ethnographic details of Jean Rouch; the contemplative fictions of Pedro Costa, Albert Serra, Lav Diaz, and others. For these sensory recordings of the rural landscape, however, categories like documentary, ethnography, fiction, and avant-garde seem not only outdated, but ultimately worthless. It is the image, the senses, and what viewers find on the screen, and in themselves, that matters."

The series kicks off this coming weekend with Lisandro Alonso's 2001 feature La Libertad, and I felt now would be a good time to revisit my notes taken from Alonso's presentation of the film at the Northwest Film Forum's 2009 retrospective "At the Edge of the World"

* * *

La Libertad (Freedom, 2001) screened in the Un Certain Regard section at the 2001 Cannes Film Festival, and scored nominations and wins on the film festival circuit, including the FIPRESCI prize. The son of a cattle rancher and disinclined to carry on with the family business, Alonso was a 25-year-old recent graduate of the Universidad del Cine in Buenos Aires when he made La Libertad; "outside of Buenos Aires but within Argentina." Alonso met the film's protagonist Misael Saavedra on his father's ranch. Misael, logger by trade, epitomized non-urban youth for Alonso; his reaction to the then-popular trend in Argentine cinema to revel in urban narratives. Perhaps it was Alonso's rural background that granted him familiarity with Misael's incommunication?

Alonso spent eight months in the Argentine Pampas with Misael. It was a difficult cohabitation because they had little in common to talk about; but, slowly, they developed a trust. Once he gained Misael's trust, Alonso proposed making the film. Fueled by his anger that his film proposals were not being considered by the Universidad del Cine in Buenos Aires, Alonso took on La Libertad independently. The shoot consisted of 10 days with a 12-person crew. The film remained "in the box" for eight months because neither friends nor family liked it. He was frustrated. But then—unexpectedly—La Libertad became a festival darling.

Alonso's method of filming consists of long takes (usually four minutes) which he restructures in the editing room, making minor manipulations to create—as he puts it—"strange expressions of natural everyday things." The result is—as the Harvard Film Archive program capsule

James Quandt observed in his insightful essay "Ride Lonesome": "So matter-of-fact and uninflected is the film's recording of Misael's daily routines (faithfully re-created from weeks of Alonso's close observation of the man's actual life and edited so that several sequences seem to adhere as real-time) that describes—"a poetic meditation on labor and landscape."La Libertad has been hailed as the apotheosis of Bazinian realism."

Quandt further tracked that at Cannes "the film elicited inevitable claims that the boundary between fiction and documentary had been blurred, collapsed, or straddled." Alonso, however, argues that La Libertad is not a documentary, though he grants audiences the sovereignty to think however they want about the film. He stresses his concern is more with the point of view of the audience than his own.

The issue of labor chafes against the film's title. "La Libertad subtly questions the 'freedom' and identity alternately gained and lost by the daily burden of hard labor," the Harvard program capsule concludes. At Slant, Ed Gonzalez notes that "the film's long takes and the cyclical, labored nature of the man's daily grind force the spectator to question the nature of freedom." At Parallax View, Jay Kuehner comments: "Clearly, here was a director who had denuded his cinema down to its sheerest essentials, and what remained was a nominally minimal but ultimately voluptuous portrait of a beautifully forlorn landscape inhabited rather efficiently by a man and his work. Nature, and civilization. The banal, and the mythic. The story was not new—who hasn't worked an arduous day's labor at some time? But the grammar with which it was told was. Radically so." At Elusive Lucidity [broken link], Zach Campbell wonders whether the title is ironic: "Is the protagonist, Misael, free in the nature of his labor and solitude, or is he burdened by its necessity?" "The irony," Robert Koehler concludes at Film Journey, "is that there's nothing absolutely Argentine about La libertad. Its freedom is a freedom from nationality, time-space, narrative laws, camera laws and the expectations that audiences instinctively impose on themselves. But pay attention to the actual translation of the Spanish title: 'Liberty'—a harder, more profound word than 'freedom,' a word pointing to a greater leap, a commitment to an ideal, an identifier for an equation that even describes its opposition—oppression. Liberty is harder-won. Liberty is that thing that the films that really matter aspire to. This one just has the balls to take it as its own name."

In the film's final "quietly confrontational" sequence, Misael munches on roasted armadillo and then stares directly at the audience "as if"—Ed Gonzalez suggests at Slant—"daring us to question or challenge the integrity of his way of life", or what Sean Axmaker describes as "the integrity of the quotidian." "As if" becomes a convenient way to extrapolate Alonso's otherwise notoriously withheld motivations. Alonso admits that by encouraging Misael to look directly into the camera, he deconstructed documentary expectations and created a direct relationship with the audience. Alonso simply told Misael to "act" as if were looking at someone who was eating across a table from him.

The film's original ending had Misael laughing outloud while looking into the camera—achieved by Alonso unexpectedly dropping his pants; but—persuaded by the Cannes Festival to (as Quandt puts it) "remove this Brechtian breach"—Alonso settled for the somber, more atmospheric ending.

Many critics of the film have suggested it would have sufficed better as a short; but, aware that no one recovers costs on a short film, Alonso chose to make a feature in hopes he might recover some of his family's investment. His father was the film's producer.

When La Libertad premiered at Cannes, one of the critics from Cahiers du Cinema complained that Alonso treated his non-actor Misael like he was a monkey. "I'm sorry to tell you, but he's wrong about how I direct my actors," Alonso asserted defensively. "I'm not trying to make any money from the films. I'm not trying to use them." He knows he's working with non-actors and has to develop specific approaches with them. He can't ask them to behave like professional actors. Nonetheless the question of Alonso's artistic sincerity clouded the film's Cannes reception. As Jay Kuehner summarized at Parallax View: "The question persisted whether Alonso's film was, to reduce the argument, an act of abstract humanism. Was it possible that esteemed auteurs held a kind of deep faith in their wounded protagonists yet had little regard in reality for their more immediate brethren?"

Cross-published on Twitch.

PSIFF 2011: CARANCHO—The Evening Class Interview With Pablo Trapero

Pablo Trapero was born in San Justo, Buenos Aires, Argentina in 1971. He wrote, directed and edited the short films Mocoso Malcriado (1993) and Negocios (1995) before directing his feature debut, the award-winning Crane World (1999), a black and white 16mm film that proved to be a breaking point in Argentine cinema and that encouraged dozens of young directors into their first features. Crane World was released internationally at Venice, harvesting awards and critical acclaim at film festivals around the world.

In 2002, his second feature El Bonaerense premiered at Un Certain Regard in the Cannes Film Festival, again to critical and audience acclaim. That same year he opened his own production company Matanza Cine in Buenos Aires, from which he has produced ever since not only his own features but also those of other Argentine and Latin American filmmakers, including Lisandro Alonso, Enrique Bellande and Raúl Perrone. "Matanza", Trapero informed me when we met at the 2010 Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF), is the name of the neighborhood where he was born and raised and literally means "the killing." El Bonoaerense was filmed there, as were several sequences for Carancho (2010), Trapero's sixth feature and Argentina's official submission to the Foreign Language category of the 2011 Academy Awards®. It's been picked up for North American distribution by Strand Releasing and has been programmed into the Awards Buzz: Best Foreign Language Film sidebar at the 2011 Palm Springs International Film Festival (PSIFF).

As a director, between shorts and TV films, Trapero's credits include Rolling Family (2004), Born and Bred (2006), and Lion's Den (2008). My thanks to Marcus Hu of Strand Releasing for setting me up to interview Pablo Trapero at TIFF and to Doug Cummings for initially publishing the transcript of our conversation at the AFI Fest website.

* * *

Michael Guillén: Let's start with the title of your film. What does carancho mean?

Pablo Trapero: Carancho is a vulture; but—how do I say this?—it's handsome in a way; it's goodlooking. The feeling you have in front of this bird is not like the feeling you normally have in front of a vulture. Still, they eat roadkill.

Guillén: Is a carancho different than a zopilote?

Trapero: Yes. You only find a carancho in the countryside, in the pampa. It's a big bird. The idea is that it represents the character Sosa (Ricardo Darín). Interestingly enough, after the film showed in Argentina, people began using the term carancho to describe these types of lawyers. Recently in Argentina, in fact, the anti-carancho law was announced.

Guillén: Carancho immediately reminded me of a comment made by Uruguayan author Eduardo Galeano that the term "accident" to describe a car wreck is inaccurate. Galeano argues that there is nothing accidental about car wrecks; that, in fact, from the moment cars were manufactured and set loose on the roadways car wrecks were inevitable. He said a better word to describe a car wreck would be "a consequence", rather than "an accident". In the case of Carancho, it might be said that it's also a consequence that cars would be rigged to crash. I'm intrigued that you've used a love story to reflect upon this corruption. Why did you move in that direction?

Trapero: The idea was to create a love story within a war zone; to show a love that comes from desperation or an extreme situation. Both ideas began at the same time: the love story and its environment. From the beginning I had the two characters of the lawyer and the emergency room doctor: they're two professions that one sees all over Argentina. I did a lot of research to learn about their worlds. Also at the beginning was the idea of creating a film noir.

Guillén: I'm surprised that you reference film noir because—though others have referenced it as such—you've initially called Carancho "a classic black thriller", which I feel is more accurate. For me, Carancho is not a film noir; it's more a straightforward crime drama. So I want to make sure what you mean by using "noir" in this reference: are you referring to using a relationship to reflect a dark social situation? Social problems that could be considered dark?

Trapero: That's right. But not by talking about those problems. More by having them be present in the background. That's how I mean noir. Through this love story we can guess the bigger picture.

Guillén: One of the pleasures of Carancho for me were its scenes of unexpected violence in situations where I wouldn't have anticipated them. For example, when the drunk man Luján (Martina Gusmán) is trying to help assaults her in the ambulance or—even more so—the gang war in the emergency room. The latter scene, especially, came off thrillingly comic. The audience I was in actually laughed at that scene.

Trapero: Ah, really? Great!

Guillén: Can you speak to your usages of violence, such that at times it's funny and other times not?

Trapero: In both of the scenes you mention, the violence serves as a way to let off steam. It's an escape valve for the intensity of the emotions. Of course, the violence serves a black humor in the film but not everyone understands that and some take it very seriously. But I meant it to be enjoyed, as you say you enjoyed it. And that enjoyment has to do with the contradictions in the situation; the contrast between what Luján is trying to do—she's trying to help others—and instead there's violence against others. In that is a black humor.

Guillén: And no one is better at capturing these contradictions than Ricardo Darín. The carancho is a perfect metaphor for his character because on one level he's contemptible for being an ambulance chaser; but, he's also somehow charming about it. As you described the carancho, there's something seductive in Sosa's predatory nature. In fact, I'm frequently amused in Darín's performances in how he goes about seducing his female leads.

Trapero: Which is the same as saying how he seduces his audiences.

Guillén: Exactly. Though his characters—and particularly Sosa in Carancho—possess questionable ethics, he charms you into accepting his seedy ethics. He's what I would call an operator. What was it like working with him? It was your first time, no?

Trapero: Yes, it was my first time to work with him. Of course, I've known Ricardo since always. I met with him to discuss this project when he was shooting Juan José Campanella's The Secret In Their Eyes (2009). At a very early stage of developing the treatment, I contacted him to see what he thought, if he liked it, and if he would like to be in the movie? We kept in touch about all developments on the story.

Both of them, Ricardo and Martina Gusmán made a good team. I could feel their chemistry from the very beginning. We knew from their first meeting that it could work; that it should work. I spent a lot of time with both of them reading the script in table rehearsals, talking about it, having lunch, having drinks, talking and talking, even more than true rehearsals with the scenes. We went straight from those discussions to filming the scenes rather than directly rehearsing them too much. This was the opposite of how Martina actually works. She spent six months researching her role, once a week doing a 24-hour shift in an actual hospital emergency ward. In effect, she became an assistant to the emergency doctor. Her approach to the role was very old-fashioned, you know? She became the character, little by little.

Guillén: This is your third time to work with Martina Gusmán. What is it in her talent that you keep wanting to film in your movies?

Trapero: It's funny, because when we met a long time ago she was working in a production; that's how we met. But since she was four years old, she's been studying as an actress. When she was 17, she worked with a famous maestro named Carlos Gandolfo, which was unique for her being so young. Martina has deep formation as an actress. What I like about her work is how she goes through her characters. Her attention to detail—movement, her way of looking—this is more important than simply reciting the right words at the right moment. Both Martina and Ricardo are technical in their craft. If I tell them to move from here to there, they always hit their marks; but, at the same time, they can improvise as needed. I like to add new elements to a scene while we're shooting. Take by take, I'm always trying to improve the film, trying to make each take unique. Both of them are good at that. Of course, Martina knows me too well. But it's great to have that foundation and trust.

Guillén: I loved her performance, of course, in Lion's Den; but, have to say I loved her performance even more in Carancho. Let's shift to your sound design. You've used much ambient traffic noise, of course, which I'm presuming was fully conscious?

Trapero: I mentioned earlier about the idea of a war zone, an environment that's really tough on the characters, but I didn't want to just film that on camera. I wanted to bring the mood of it to the scenes, to suggest that life is really tough out there. All the noises and sounds are a way of providing information to the audience, even if Sosa and Luján are just cooking or watching television or resting quietly on the sofa, the audience hears all the living city sounds drifting in from outside their window.

Guillén: Can you speak to working with your cinematographer Julián Apezteguia to capture the feeling of confined vehicular spaces?

Trapero: It was strange to film in such tight spaces and we had a lot of long sequence takes, some as long as eight minutes. We didn't use a steadicam or anything like that. Julián always used a handheld RED camera, though with the assistance of a harness, and we shot in real cars. As for locations, we shot in real hospitals for the ambiance but we also built sets within the walls of the hospital to shoot the scenes in the emergency room. These sets had hidden access doors so that we could effect the long takes going through these small rooms.

Guillén: Lately I've been intrigued by what constitutes a "contemporary" film, especially from the directorial vantage. As your films frequently directly address social issues—such as the insurance fraud in Carancho—do you consider your films contemporary? What does that term mean for you?

Trapero: I like the idea that my films have a dialogue with what is happening in the world off screen; but, I'm not sure if that could be called "contemporary." Maybe it is? My films are more a witness or a portrait of the moment. Even if you are shooting a science fiction film you are commenting upon the moment when you are shooting. It's not a matter of just being contemporary in terms of time, but in views of reality. That's what I like. When you make a film, you can feel the time when you were making the film; but, you can also feel it working on you now when you watch it. I like that a film can last for years and that it reflects the time when it was made; but, can still talk to audiences many years later. That for me is a contemporary film, even if it was shot 80 years ago. I like the idea of talking with movies over time.

Guillén: Can you talk a bit about your production company Matanza Cine? Do you have a signature style to the films you produce? A certain look? Or a certain message you're trying to get across in your films?

Trapero: No, no. What I enjoy doing with Matanza is to help directors throw it out there, to do it in the way that is proper to them, in the way they want to. I help them to have creative control. I give them the tools to help them go through the production of a film and to do it in such a way that the necessary production of a film does not hurt the soul of the film and a filmmaker's unique vision. I try to help them survive the process because sometimes making a movie fights against the spirit of their vision.

Cross-published on Twitch.

PSIFF 2011: CARANCHO—A Critical Overview

Programmed within my favorite sidebar at the Palm Springs International Film Festival (PSIFF)—i.e., Awards Buzz: Best Foreign Language Film (which this year is featuring 40 of the 65 official submissions to the 2011 Academy Awards®)—Pablo Trapero's Carancho (2010) chases the shrill sound of ambulance sirens. I first caught this film at the 2010 Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) and feel now is a good time to revisit those notes.

As synopsized by PSIFF: "Rooted in the reality of the corruption and violence of Buenos Aires, this gritty modern-day noir features Ricardo Darín (The Secret In Their Eyes and The Son Of The Bride) as Hector Sosa who, like the titular vulture-like bird, swoops down on unfortunate victims of Argentina's shockingly commonplace road accidents. Having lost his law license, he is relegated to the role of ambulance chaser for his thuggish employers who profit from a flourishing industry of false claims and insurance scams, fleecing victims of the bulk of any settlement received through their 'foundation.'

"When he meets Luján [Martina Gusmán (Lion's Den)], an overworked medic who is wrestling with her own demons as she tries to save the lives of Sosa's 'clients,' he has a dramatic change of heart, but his plans to escape this life and change his ways go horribly awry. With crisp, tight editing, this lean and suspenseful thriller takes us through accident sites, hospital wards, and seedy interior settings that would be perfectly in place in a Hollywood noir. Carancho is the latest example of director Trapero's trademark socially realistic cinema."

Carancho explores the notion that "behind every tragedy, there is an industry." As Diana Sanchez detailed in her program notes for Carancho's North American premiere at TIFF 2010, Trapero's film is "a story drawn from the alarming violence on his country's streets" and "an engrossing love story set among people who trade in sudden tragedy and death." Tracking the film's press notes, Sanchez writes: "Each year, more than eight thousand people are killed on the road and over a hundred thousand are injured. As a result, a disturbingly large part of the Argentine economy revolves around traffic accidents, and a profit stands to be made from the ongoing flow of medical expenses and insurance claims. Trapero's sixth feature plunges into this murky world of opportunism, spotlighting the crooks that swoop in on emergency rooms and accident scenes."

At Twitch, Todd Brown reported from the film's Cannes premiere: "A film that fuses stellar character work and intimate drama with larger thriller and heist moments with a few elements of shocking violence thrown in for good measure, Carancho is a masterful piece of work from writer / director / producer / editor Pablo Trapero. Trapero serves notice here that he is one of the very best film makers in the world today. Period. The complexity of his characters, the technical quality of the film work, his ability to balance intimate emotion with realistic and brutal action sequences, his obvious skill in working with actors—though that is made easier when you have actors the caliber of [Ricardo] Darín to work with—Trapero is at the highest level in all of these. Flawless? Carancho comes pretty damn close." As if to cinch the deal, Brown has included Carancho in his year-end top picks, emphasizing that "Ricardo Darín anchors Pablo Trapero's Carancho with a riveting, complex performance as a broken man slowly unraveling thanks to the tiny moré of conscience he retains. Classic noir in content if not in style, Trapero's film spins its amoral tale of insurance scams and ambulance chasing in as unaffected a style as possible, letting events play out in a cold, almost clinical fashion as his characters stumble inevitably to a bad end. The always stellar Darín has never been better and he's perfectly matched to both director and story."

At MUBI, Daniel Kasman praises Trapero as a steady, sure-handed genre craftsman. Kasman reported from TIFF: "Carancho has the solidity of construction and reliance on conventional character types and story arcs to effectively normalize a highly specific and localized setting. The result, like an early '30s Hollywood entry, is a workman film, one made by a director prodigious enough to pick such a unglamorous setting and proceed to cast it in a reliably realistic and unappealing light—'cause that's the way it really is. ...The film is so solid that any room for ambiguity is left out of the digital masonry of the mise-en-scène, which builds a clear schema where, simply, anyone involved in the nocturnal world of deaths and near-deaths, accidents and 'incidents' is implicated in the gloom, no questions asked. Thus the modest ambitions of a genre film stay within its modest limits, rather than escaping into the unease of the shadows, blossoming within gray shades of morality, or aesthetically expanded in risky angles, lighting, and other stylistics."

Cross-published on Twitch.

TIFF 2010 / AFI FEST 2010: CARANCHO—The Evening Class Interview With Pablo Trapero

Pablo Trapero was born in San Justo, Buenos Aires, Argentina in 1971. He wrote, directed and edited the short films Mocoso Malcriado (1993) and Negocios (1995) before directing his feature debut, the award-winning Crane World (1999), a black and white 16mm film that proved to be a breaking point in Argentine cinema and that encouraged dozens of young directors into their first features. Crane World was released internationally at Venice, harvesting awards and critical acclaim at film festivals around the world.

In 2002, his second feature El Bonaerense premiered at Un Certain Regard in the Cannes Film Festival, again to critical and audience acclaim. That same year he opened his own production company Matanza Cine in Buenos Aires, from which he has produced ever since not only his own features but also those of other Argentine and Latin American filmmakers, including Lisandro Alonso, Enrique Bellande and Raúl Perrone. "Matanza", Trapero informed me, is the name of the neighborhood where he was born and raised and literally means "the killing." El Bonoaerense was filmed there, as were several sequences for Carancho (2010), Trapero's sixth feature and Argentina's official submission to the Foreign Language category of the 2011 Academy Awards®. It's been picked up for North American distribution by Strand Releasing.

As a director, between shorts and TV films, his credits include Rolling Family (2004), Born and Bred (2006), and Lion's Den (2008). Carancho explores the notion that "behind every tragedy, there is an industry." As Diana Sanchez detailed in her program notes for Carancho's North American premiere at TIFF 2010, Trapero's film is "a story drawn from the alarming violence on his country's streets" and "an engrossing love story set among people who trade in sudden tragedy and death." Tracking the film's press notes, Sanchez writes: "Each year, more than eight thousand people are killed on the road and over a hundred thousand are injured. As a result, a disturbingly large part of the Argentine economy revolves around traffic accidents, and a profit stands to be made from the ongoing flow of medical expenses and insurance claims. Trapero's sixth feature plunges into this murky world of opportunism, spotlighting the crooks that swoop in on emergency rooms and accident scenes."

At Twitch, Todd Brown reported from the film's Cannes premiere: "A film that fuses stellar character work and intimate drama with larger thriller and heist moments with a few elements of shocking violence thrown in for good measure, Carancho is a masterful piece of work from writer / director / producer / editor Pablo Trapero. Trapero serves notice here that he is one of the very best film makers in the world today. Period. The complexity of his characters, the technical quality of the film work, his ability to balance intimate emotion with realistic and brutal action sequences, his obvious skill in working with actors—though that is made easier when you have actors the caliber of [Ricardo] Darín to work with—Trapero is at the highest level in all of these. Flawless? Carancho comes pretty damn close."

At MUBI, Daniel Kasman praises Trapero as a steady, sure-handed genre craftsman. Kasman reports from the film's North American premiere at Toronto: "Carancho has the solidity of construction and reliance on conventional character types and story arcs to effectively normalize a highly specific and localized setting. The result, like an early 30s Hollywood entry, is a workman film, one made by a director prodigious enough to pick such a unglamorous setting and proceed to cast it in a reliably realistic and unappealing light—'cause that's the way it really is. ...The film is so solid that any room for ambiguity is left out of the digital masonry of the mise-en-scène, which builds a clear schema where, simply, anyone involved in the nocturnal world of deaths and near-deaths, accidents and 'incidents' is implicated in the gloom, no questions asked. Thus the modest ambitions of a genre film stay within its modest limits, rather than escaping into the unease of the shadows, blossoming within gray shades of morality, or aesthetically expanded in risky angles, lighting, and other stylistics."

My thanks to Marcus Hu of Strand Releasing for setting me up to interview Pablo Trapero at the Toronto International and to Doug Cummings for publishing the transcript of our conversation on his AFI Fest website [here] in conjunction with the film's screening this evening at the Mann Chinese 6 Theatre in Hollywood.

Cross-published on Twitch.

ARGENTINE CINEMA: AT THE EDGE OF THE WORLD—Lisandro Alonso On Liverpool (2008)

Seattle-based journalist Jay Kuehner introduced the screening of Liverpool. "I was told to keep it to five words," he quipped, "so: distant, remote, vodka….?" Kuehner opined that Liverpool consolidates one of the most thematically strong trilogies seen from the cinema in quite some time, especially from such a fairly young director. Many claims have been made both for and against Alonso's cinema: that his are exercises in style and that his films reflect more on him than on his subjects and that—to his credit—he is pioneering a new film language (which, Kuehner suggested, might very well be true).

Earlier in the afternoon at the Masters Workshop, Kuehner wrote down Alonso's statement that he pays attention and thinks about everything: the way that a man eats, goes to the bathroom, and—in the case of Liverpool—the way that he drinks. By paying attention to small moments, Alonso has created a drama in the ongoing moment and, with that, the possibility that a lifetime of regrets can be uncovered in a single moment, or in a tiny object, as Liverpool bears out in its ending.

With Liverpool, Alonso shifted his attention away from uneducated rural laborers to an educated and well-traveled sailor who, nonetheless, is unable to communicate with his family and others. Farrel (Juan Fernández) cannot change the way he is. Even though he is experienced, he cannot change his tendency to observe others at a distance or the way he feels towards his family. After reconnecting with them, he leaves them behind ("I'm off") even though they want him to stay, hoping he can help out. This basic drama was enough for Alonso to shape his film.

Admittedly inspired by Pedro Costa's Colossal Youth, Liverpool is purposely sad and isolated. Alonso wanted to balance aesthetic pleasures with the feelings of his characters. It was filmed in the southernmost part of Argentina in the snowy port town of Ushuaia (nicknamed "the southernmost city in the world"). The film is purposely short on dialogue, adhering to Alonso's mistrust of words. His goal was to tell his story through the images.

In many ways films are like paintings for Alonso, in the sense that there's no way to explain why an artist chooses to use the color blue here and the color red there. He tries to make films for everybody but not everybody wants his films. It's not that he creates films just for film festivals, but it's the film festivals who show his films, not the local cinemas. What should he do? Compromise and make a film that will be played in the local cinema? Or what he wants to do?

By contrast to the way that Alonso found Misael and Vargas and transformed them into the characters of his first two films, Alonso had already imagined the character of Liverpool's mariner Farrel before casting Juan Fernández in the role. True to technique, Alonso knew he wanted to make a film in this part of the world and that he wanted to film within a cargo ship. He had seen a magazine published by United Colors of Benetton that included some photographs of Ushuaia and the people who lived there and it intrigued his curiosity. The only place in Argentina where he could find a harbor that accommodated cargo ships in the snow—and he really wanted to shoot in snow—was Ushuaia. So the magazine sold him on the people and convinced him he could find a film in that place.

The following week he drove 3,500 kilometers over a few days until he arrived in Ushuaia. He stayed there three to four days to organize his ideas, watching the people and how they lived. One of them—the cook who owns the restaurant and operates the short wave radio who appears in Liverpool—was staring out the window (just as he does in the film) and Alonso asked him what he was looking at? He had already walked around enough to know there was not much to look at. The cook answered that he was waiting to see if any brown rabbits would appear. Alonso didn't know how long the cook had entertained this habit of looking out the window for rabbits, but it awakened him to the possibility of creating a film that would show this community and how they lived. He didn't know if Ushuaia's inhabitants were running away from something or why they were a people who preferred not to have much contact with outsiders.

As Alonso detailed in my interview with him in Toronto, Alonso found Juan Fernández in Ushuaia. Fernández operated a snow plow caterpillar that kept the roads clear. In fact, the scene where Farrel waits with card-playing locals for a lift from a truck driving into the interior is the place where Fernández actually works.

Kuehner asked Alonso to explore the theme of how location forms character and character forms location. Alonso specified that he works at the same level with space and character. In Liverpool he tried to use frozen nature to explain the character of Farrel. Others would ask what he was doing filming in such an empty place; but, for Alonso such empty places talk about many things that are happening inside Farrel. This intuitive trust in the articulative potential of empty spaces conforms to Alonso's penchant to leave his camera lingering in empty rooms after characters have left the scene, as if more is said by their absence than their presence. Alonso's camera is infatuated with the white shadow.

Before he started the film, Alonso created a history for the character of Farrel. Though he didn't know what it was that Farrel did in the first place to make him run away for so many years, Alonso suspected it must have been something wrong—maybe it had something to do with Analia?—but, whatever it was, Farrel took off on the cargo ship and didn't return. When the ship eventually returned to Ushuaia, after however many years, Farrel felt guilty about the fact that he had stayed away from "home" for so long. So he asked for shore leave to see if his mother was still alive. He finds her fragile with an addled memory. And though his remaining family members don't ask it outright, they want his help and hope he'll stay; but, he refuses and leaves. That's what Alonso felt from his film anyway, though he acknowledges others may not have the same reaction. The information has been organized in the film and it's up to the audience to decide how they want to take it, what they think it means, and create a narrative or non-narrative history for the character.

Alonso likes to query his audiences about where they think Farrel is going when he walks off towards the woods in the film's longest shot. One person responded that Farrel was going to get the black bag he stashed away when he first got off the cargo ship. But Alonso is not so sure. If his intention was to return to the cargo ship, why did Farrel remove all his belongings from the cabin? Then why did he take only what he could carry in his red bag, leaving the rest in the black bag? Perhaps he never intended to return? Perhaps he intended to disappear? That's Alonso's interpretation; but, if the audience has a different interpretation and wants to believe that Farrel catches a truck that takes him back to his cargo ship in time to sail off, that's fine; but Alonso is not so sure.

What will be the future of those Farrel has left behind? What will happen to the girl Analia? All she has to remind her of her father is a keychain that reads "Liverpool." Can she even read? Alonso doesn't know. Can she imagine what Liverpool means? To her it might just be a key chain that's red and blue. Developmentally disabled as she is, Alonso's not even sure she can distinguish between red and blue. Ironically, this keychain that has so much meaning for Farrel—that represents his life as a sailor traveling around the world, abstracted into a single memento—possibly means nothing to Analia, his daughter.

Alonso believes cinema needs smart critics to help keep his kind of independent filmmaking alive. In Argentina he recommends Quintin who he finds argumentative. Quintin is far from diplomatic in his writing, prefers to fight over films, something Alonso respects. As Alonso puts it, cinema needs "main critics who separate water from oil" and "publish in a main forum, not just one website."

Alonso refuses to shoot digitally because of the medium's destruction of 35mm culture. Part of digital filmmaking is the practice of shooting alone. By contrast, Alonso believes a true film requires a group of collaborators to help shape the film. It's an entirely different process than shooting alone, even though he knows it can be done. James Benning does it. Pedro Costa. But they are exceptional.

Filming anywhere other than Argentina is problematic for Alonso. He is familiar with his Argentine subjects; he understands them fully—"what they eat, how they walk, their sex, etc."—but he wouldn't have the same familiarity with non-Argentine actors, nor the same connection with the land.

Alonso saw Quentin Tarantino's Inglorious Basterds and thought it was just fine; but, the real cinematic experience for him was watching the audience's reactions: how they talked, where they laughed, what excited them. Alonso realized the audience for Inglorious Basterds was simply not his audience and never would be. That's just the way it is.

As for what's coming up, every morning Alonso wakes up thinking about an idea he has for his next film but it is not strong enough to support a film and he's not ready to start the process again of writing, securing funding, shooting, editing, promoting. He feels lucky to have made the four films he's made. Alonso has decided to take a break from filmmaking for the next few years. Now that he's been out of the family business for the last 10 years, he wants to return to the ranch and see what his brothers are doing.

His decision has something to do as well with the fact that as a filmmaker he is trying to find new questions for his cinema language so that he doesn't keep repeating himself. He wants to do more than just make films about one man on a horse in the desert, "riding lonesome" as James Quandt puts it in his recently-republished Artforum essay.

In all frankness, Alonso admits that he is not very positive about the future of filmmaking in general and his own in particular, though he will keep trying to make films. He enjoys the entertainment of genre films but it troubles him that their popularity is diminishing the diversity of cinema language. He wants to see new faces, films from Africa for example, because there is so much he does not know about Africans.

Cross-published on Twitch.

ARGENTINE CINEMA: AT THE EDGE OF THE WORLD—Lisandro Alonso On Fantasma (2006)

As Jay Kuehner assesses for Parallax View: "Fantasma, per its title, coyly and spectrally endeavors to bring together the principal 'non-actors' of his previous films to Buenos Aires, to the fabled Teatro San Martín, for—what else?—a retrospective of Alonso's films. The setup is an ingenious way to bring nature to the city, actors to their affect, and audiences to their subjective screens." The program capsule for the Harvard Film Archives notes the offbeat delight in watching Argentino Vargas wandering the labyrinthine corridors of the Teatro San Martín "in search of the film's premiere."

Fantasma was Alonso's way of saying thank you to the lead actors in his first two films: Misael Saavedra (La Libertad) and Argentino Vargas (Los Muertos). He wanted to thank them because they had both helped him change a certain portion of his life when he became his kind of filmmaker. Fantasma is an inbetween film in many respects. First of all, he was not able to secure the budget he needed to make the film he initially planned to make and, instead, elected to shoot a featurette.

All of Fantasma's scenes were shot in the Teatro San Martín, the cinematheque where Alonso grew up watching films. Teatro San Martín is part of a five-theater cooperative (the Complejo Teatral de Buenos Aires) where the films of modern filmmakers such as Bresson, Fassbinder, and Kurosawa have been screened. For many years it was the only place he could see serious film, especially in his later student years when he spent much time there, often among audiences that numbered no more than three or four people, which was admittedly wonderful in a certain way. Sitting alone in a cinema, or sharing a film with only a few people, Alonso could enjoy a film undistracted by voices around him. He wonders if that solitude isn't what made him feel so strongly about film? Without question, Teatro San Martín's physicality left a lasting impression. Further, where tickets were $10 at other venues, at the Teatro San Martín they were only a few. Though he often focuses on people outside of Buenos Aires who don't even know what cinema is and often have never seen a movie themselves, even within Buenos Aires most people don't have the dispensible income to go to movies that are questionably marginal, and rarely discussed in the public sector. If they can't talk about a film with their friends, they tend not to go. Which is to say that choice as much as access determines what filmgoers in Buenos Aires support.

Having visited Misrael in the Pampas and Vargas in Corrientes, Alonso felt it was time to invite them to Buenos Aires for the theatrical opening of Los Muertos. Admittedly, the film is limited and "a strange film, maybe." If you don't know who Misrael and Vargas are, Fantasma makes no sense. As an "inbetween film" requiring the first two, Fantasma continues to pursue Alonso's questions and critiques of Argentine filmic identity. "It seems there's two different kinds of Argentina," he mused. "One is Buenos Aires and one is outside Buenos Aires." When people talk about Argentina, they're usually referencing Buenos Aires, its main city. Similarly, when Argentines talk about culture and what there is to enjoy in Argentina, it's presumed this must be within the city. Alonso invited Misael and Vargas to Buenos Aires because he wanted to shoot how they fit into the cinematheque, which is a building that—though it means little to anyone else—means a lot to the people of Buenos Aires, and especially to him. As it was under reconstruction, the building was empty and Alonso took advantage of this opportunity to shoot his film. If they had said no to his request to film there, Fantasma would never have been made; the building was that important to the concept. As James Quandt specifies: "Fantasma is no less a film of landscape than the previous two. Like the pampas of La Libertad and the jungle of Los Muertos, the labyrinthine San Martín becomes Fantasma's second character: As much as the camera may linger on a now gaunter Vargas, in from the wild and uneasier than ever, Fantasma makes setting its preoccupation."

Fantasma was also Alonso's attempt at comedy, though unfortunately no one laughed. Or more, it was that he "wanted to enjoy some jokes in the film" and to also comment on the kinds of film he wants to see; films which are vanishing and disappearing from distribution. Shortly before he made Fantasma, he had seen Tsai Ming-liang's Goodbye, Dragon Inn and—though Fantasma comes nowhere near Goodbye, Dragon Inn—it was evidently influenced by that film. Several critics have noted the resemblance. Quandt offers a separate comparison: "But, oddly, it is Tati who most comes to mind in surveying the San Martín's modernist horror of malfunctioning elevators, confounding staircases, and harshly lit hallways, rooms too ample or cramped, humanity subjugated to decor, architecture, mazes, and machinery. Like Tati, Alonso sees in this surrounding a kind of elegant inutility, a vast contraption in which people stumble, turn back, retrace their steps, push buttons that don't work, tentatively position themselves in spaces not designed for their being, much less comfort."

For Alonso, the pleasure of shooting Fantasma involved such things as realizing that Vargas had never in his life walked on a staircase, which Alonso could detect when Vargas walked down them. That told him a lot about Vargas in different spaces. You felt no awkward discomfort watching Vargas walk in his natural habitat the jungle. In fact, when they walked together in the jungle, Vargas laughed at how Alonso walked. "This was how I took my revenge," Alonso grinned, "though it wasn't easy." He had to work at convincing the reluctant Vargas to come to Buenos Aires. It wasn't about the money. But Alonso eventually convinced him to come enjoy the process and Vargas subsequently returned to Buenos Aires when Fantasma was released at the cinematheque, which was something like playing with mirrors because the film was made and shown in the same place. It was a multi-layered experience, especially after the film when the audience exited the auditorium into the spaces depicted in the film.

In some ways the film closed a cycle with Misael and Vargas. Perhaps in the future they will do another film together? Or maybe he can find new people to replace them? He cast his ex-girlfriend Rosa Martinez as the employee of the cinema. One of the other actors worked in the cinematheque itself. He tries to work with people who enjoy the particular experience of acting in one film.

Before making Fantasma, Alonso was impressed with Gus van Sant's Last Days because it made him question what cinema is today. He realized he doesn't know what cinema is nowadays. Last Days reminded him that cinema is "simply" image and sound. So he tried to create a strange feeling about the cinematheque but with sounds from the cinematheque, like telephones and elevators. With his camera crew he captured environmental sounds such as street traffic.

Fantasma served as a bridge (or as Quandt describes it, "a pendant") between Los Muertos and Liverpool. Alonso already knew he would be shooting several interiors with artificial lighting in Liverpool. Fantasma gave him the chance to practice, since he had mainly done exterior shots until then. He made many mistakes and perhaps even repeated some of those mistakes in Liverpool.

Cross-published on Twitch.