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Reviews
Lugares comunes (2002)
A necessary film
Aristarain is one the greatest film-maker in Argentina; if he were born in an other country (more economically powerful) he would probably be a sort of classic film-maker in the history of cinema. Aristarain belongs to an old generation of argentinian artists who has been wise enough in order to keep on with his believes and aesthetics but without being stuck in the past. His movies are fresh and sharp. He doesn't lose his grip which makes his narratives very well deployed as well as subordinated to a couple of constant topics: the lost of national identity, or the dialectical swing between subjectivity and social life which is doubled in another kind of paradoxical choice between remain faithful towards oneself or to give up and obey the conservative imperative of petty-bourgeois which demand to fit in the status quo. Lugares comunes looks like a minimalist film, but it is a essential one because whatever is unnecessary in this story is not included. Luppi, by the way the best actor from Las pampas, is a literature teacher, a prototype of middle class member who is retired in advance. He is a leftist man who have found that the dream of another society started in 1879, and after that date that longing for another kind of society has been systematically betrayed. Sampietro, his wife, is an spanish woman who work with the poor. After being left with a miserable pension they have to reconsider where they want to (and can) live. They finally end running a farm. The film has many virtues: for instance, one is able to see how social history determine and comprise the psyche life of individuals. Moreover, Lugares comunes is a document of Argentinian decadence, a very satisfactory tale of how people manage to keep its decency. But it is also a love story and a philosophical meditation about getting older, the limits of reason, and how to live when there is not any transcendental meaning except the fact of being alive. The name of the film is an ironic antithesis because Lugares comunes is at odds with common sense: it is a honest critic of each ideological gadgets which has made of Argentina a ghost and creepy territory where people want to fade or voluntary exile if they still strive for being alive with any gesture of human integrity.
Rat Race (2001)
Free associations from a childish mind
Cynical and sad, the first adjective matches with comedies, but not the second one, this Zucker movie is not a movie in itself, but a couple of free associations whose IQ required to see it is less than a chimpanzee watching The planet of the ape. Some boring patrons and a excentric tycoon who run a casino choose by random a group of individuals which engage in a race to get 2 millions dollars. The individual zeal and greedy is overcome when they finally got the money and found a best and humanistic choice: donate dollars to a NGO, Feed the Earth. Along the lines of Farrely brothers but without their intelligence and class sensibility, Rat Race is neither a comedy nor a movie. Not only the characters are "kidnaped" by the director's free associations, but one is also trapped by it. The great difference is -if you are not a critic- that after being 15 minutes in the multiplex you can leave theater.
Ouvrières du monde (2000)
Becoming Klein or how to film a No Logo thesis
This excellent documental about how Levis delocalize its factories from Belgium and France it might be called writing No Logo (by Naomi Klein) by others means. Aesthetically careful and theoretical rigorous, this film is critical and hopeful, and it also conveys a a kind of dialectical communication between workers from overdevelopment countries and third world countries.