Note: The fifth entry in the Allan Fish Bonanza Encore Series was selected by the great writer and impassioned cineaste Sachin Gandhi, the erstwhile proprietor of ‘Scribbles and Ramblings.’
by Allan Fish
(Argentina 2008 245m) not on DVD
Aka. Historias Extraordinarias
Knowing the rules
p Laura Citarella d/w Mariano Llinás ph Agustin Mendilaharzu ed Alejo Moguillansky, Agustin Rolandelli m Gabriel Chwojnik
Mariano Llinás (X), Agustin Mendilaharzu (H), Walter Jakob (Z), Klaus Dietze (Cesar), Eduardo Iaccono (Factorovich), Horacio Marassi (Saponara), Hector Diaz (Salamone), Ana Livingston (Lola Gallo), Oscar Mauregui (Orlando Rey), Hector Bordoni (Carlos Armas), Lenadro Ibarra (Salvador Armas), Edmundo Lavalle (Palomeque), Pilo Nelli (Oyarzun), Victoria Hladilo (Vecina), Alberto Suarez (Lola’s older lover), Lola Arias (Alicia), Mariana Chaud (Maria Luisa), Fernando Llosa (Cuevas), Daniel Handler, Juan Minujin, Veronica Llinas (narrators),
It’s with some devilish pleasure that one imagines Robert McKee shaking his head through this film, one which breaks his cardinal rule about avoiding narrations more blatantly than any other. There had been films before with virtually no dialogue and told entirely through narration, and some great ones, from Von Sternberg’s Anatahan back to Guitry’s Le Roman d’un Tricheur, and doubtless McKee would have poo-poohed both of those, too. And yet what are rules if they are not to be broken. Nothing is for ever.
So we take three stories – well, actually more than three stories, but we’ll leave that for a moment – featuring three male protagonists who are known only by letters; initials perhaps, it’s never clear. There’s X who witnesses a meeting between a man on a tractor and two men in a red truck, a meeting which begins cordially enough but ends with one of the men in the truck blowing away the tractor driver with a shotgun. They make their exit, only for X to enter having seen the driver hide a briefcase in a hay bail just prior to the meeting. Then the driver gets up, not as fatally injured as he at first seemed, and X impulsively uses the discarded shotgun to shoot the driver for a second time, this time fatally. Then there’s Z, who goes to work for the local Federation in a mundane job which allows much time for deliberation on the life of his predecessor, Cuevas, who, as it later transpires, had anything but a mundane life. Finally, there’s H, who’s recruited to take pictures of small monoliths along a river, only to find that there is also engaged another, Cesar, whose task is to blow the monoliths up with dynamite. (more…)
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