A scene from the Alexis dos Santos film Glue. (Toronto International Film Festival)
In a single block in downtown Buenos Aires, you can see street performers juggling for change at traffic lights, cartoneros (cardboard collectors) pushing carts packed with discarded boxes they plan to sell, and countless dog walkers, each with more than a dozen animals straining on leashes. With all this commotion, it’s easy to miss the small things — like restaurant waiters, dressed in the universal black and white, rushing from street-side cafes to hand-deliver espresso to people in their apartments. Or the glances exchanged between the vendors on the subte (subway) — who peddle booklets with bus schedules for spare change — and their well-heeled customers.
The subtle details of life in Argentina play an integral part in the films of Lucrecia Martel. She is the director of The Swamp and Holy Girl and the grande dame of Argentina’s new wave of cinema. Her camera captures intimate moments that reveal much about people at either end of Argentina’s economic divide.
Martel is at the fore of a renaissance in independent film that has occurred in the five years since Argentina defaulted on its debt and came to a political and economic standstill. Some people call it a movement, others say it’s a happy coincidence that out of the dust of the crash came a cinematic flurry. Whatever your take, something has happened in Argentina that has created the optimal conditions for exciting films.
Last September’s Toronto International Film Festival premiered a number of Argentine films, including Israel Adrian Caetano’s Chronicle of an Escape, Pablo Trapero’s Born and Bred, Lisandro Alonso’s Fantasma as well as the much-anticipated Glue, directed by Alexis dos Santos, which won the 2006 Young Jury Tiger Award in Rotterdam. Both of Martel’s films were shown in past years in Toronto. The TIFF debuts helped earn her a solid reputation as a director’s director — she has since sat on the jury at Cannes — and attracted her fans like Spanish filmmaker Pedro Almodovar.
On the cool, autumnal May morning I met Martel, she chose a Parisian-style café in Buenos Aires that is kitty-corner to her apartment. Martel didn’t even have to order — the waiter intuitively brought her a pot of tea and carefully strained the leaves. Martel looked the part of the film auteur. She wore big, horn-rimmed glasses, seemingly without irony; her hair was messy, giving the impression she is more preoccupied with the artistic process than mortal concerns like combing.
Mercedes Moran and Carlos Belloso in a scene from the Lucrecia Martel film The Holy Girl. (Odeon Films)
Martel’s first feature, The Swamp, portrayed a wealthy Argentine family on a downward spiral brought on by alcoholism and indolence. After the film’s release, the country experienced its own crash. Argentina defaulted on its loans, the peso depreciated 75 per cent and the entire country slipped into an economic wasteland. More than a quarter of the population became unemployed. While it was just a coincidence that Martel’s film intersected with reality, she said it wasn’t the result of dumb luck. “I believe that any film filmed in 2001 could have to do with the crisis,” she says. It was this film that caught the attention of Almodovar, who produced Martel’s second project, Holy Girl.
Martel explores issues of class, race and privilege. The geographic backdrop for her stories is Salta, the northern city where she grew up. Here, a large indigenous population lives alongside people of European descent. In Martel’s films, the tension between the two groups is palpable. In The Swamp, a privileged white teenager goes to a local dance, where he gropes the family’s indigenous maid on the dance floor and consequently gets into a fight with the maid’s indigenous boyfriend. The scene is fraught with racial and class tension.
“Politics is something that happens in the family, between mother and child. It’s not about what happens to the state, or between the cops,” Martel says. “Anybody who grew up in Argentina and lived step by step the history of the country can’t be unaffected by it,” she says. “It’s logical.”
Argentina’s filmmaking explosion isn’t merely focused on politics. “You get all sorts of genres, all sorts of points of view. You don’t have solely political films. You have just got great cinema,” says Diana Sanchez, a programmer for the Toronto International Film Festival who covers Latin America, Spain and Portugal. “[But] they are making films at the same time, in a similar political climate. You can’t classify it, but you can’t help grouping them together.”
Alexis dos Santos’s Glue is an Argentine film with an entirely different feel. Dos Santos’ parents fled Buenos Aires during the military dictatorship of the late 1970s, when their left-wing friends were being killed by the state. Set in the small Patagonian town of Zapala, where dos Santos grew up, Glue is based on dos Santos’s adolescence in the Patagonian wilds, where dos Santos says you won’t find much more than oil. “When you are in a small town, nothing happens. But because nothing happens, you end up doing all sorts of crazy things,” he says.
Argentinian director Alexis Dos Santos. (Carlo Allegri/Getty Images)
Dos Santos left Argentina in his early 20s to live in Europe; he has since returned, and is now based in Buenos Aires. As a result, he was in the unusual position of being able to understand his country’s cinematic revival from the inside and the outside. The week the peso crashed in 2001, dos Santos was home from London for Christmas. He watched in shock as Argentina went through five presidents in one week; by the time he boarded his flight back to London, middle-class people like his parents found their savings reduced to a quarter of their value. When he visited again six months later, there were signs that the country had changed all over, mostly for the worse. But when it came to the arts, the effect was positive.
“The crash pushed people to be creative. I could see it happening,” dos Santos says. “In London, people are always waiting for funds. The money is there, you just have to convince [investors to give it to you]. Instead, [in Argentina] they go and make it themselves, because they know they can’t wait for anything. They just find a way of doing things.”
Sanchez agrees. “A lot of people took to the arts after the crisis. Why not? You are not going to make any money doing anything else.”
Movies that used to be dismissed as regional and only of interest to Latin American audiences are now reaching international critics. Meanwhile, the directors who launched the Argentine film renaissance are moving into their third or fourth projects and beyond. Says Sanchez, “These are not one-hit wonders.”
Martel’s next movie, a thriller expected later this year, is titled La Mujer Sin Cabeza (“The Woman Who Lost Her Head”). She said it concerns a woman who accidentally runs over a dog, a relatively minor event that affects her profoundly, ultimately changing her perception of reality. While Martel’s version of her country may not look too much like those dos Santos or Lisandro Alonso capture with their lenses, perhaps, when seen together, the films that make up the country’s new wave of cinema say something true about Argentina today.
Sarah Elton is a Toronto-based writer.
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