Stephanie

This movie is the pinnacle of a failed director. I can't even use it as an example of a bad movie, it has no shape, no narrative, nothing.

This movie generated me a pack of several emotions. Sadly, all of them are bad. There are a lot of ways to make a good B-Movie, crazy hammered scripts, wild locations, funny social environments when you can see that the actors are having a good time working for almost no money. But this thing is depressive. The Director overweight the images with a mix of a 90s' videoclip but at the same time the movie is outstandingly low, creating something close to the worst of nightmares of a loony resident of Guantanamo. Finally the dialogues arise the same question in your mind every second you resist watching this thing "who care about anything it's happening?"

This is by far one of the most terrible movies I've ever seen. Boring, long, with an extremely predictable plot, poor acting and painfully directed. I wasn't surprised when I came here to rate it and found out that the only positive review was given by its own director who gave himself 10 stars. That speaks volumes of the movie itself: it can be liked only by the person who did it.

The main idea of Stephanie was, in a beginning, an austere formal find: to make a Copernican twist in the off voice, showing it not from the point of view of the narrator, but from each one of the characters who listen to it (the four remaining players in a game of poker), in such a way that in that editing of "imaginations" it would remain only unalterable the image of the narrator (embodied by just one actor, role that would be played finally by Antonio Birabent) and would vary -slightly- the locations and the characters that interact with him in his story (that is why the character who gives the name to the movie is played by four actresses). So, Stephanie, from a blurred border between the psychological thriller and the drama, joins that special territory of cinema that investigates the point of view, lead by paradigmatic titles such as Rashomon (Akira Kurosawa, 1950), L'Année dernière à Marienbad (Alain Resnais, 1961), Elisa, vida mía (Carlos Saura, 1977), The Limey (Steven Soderbergh, 1999) and the cornerstone of this school (and filmmaking in general) of 1941, which a reasonable modesty prevents to mention.

Stephanie is one of the first movies shot in Professional High Definition (1920x1080) in Argentina. Produced in an independent way, without any public nor TV funds, not even the support of any festival nor foundation, local or international, it was made in just eight days in locations of Buenos Aires city, at the end of 2004. Since then, the editing was changing, new possibilities of enrich and clarify at the same time the narration were appearing, unexpected aspects were revealed, even though for the ones who had conceived it: the main character asked being well listened, new cause-effect relations in the plot came up, in the course of time some edges were polished up and the movie remade itself. Destiny wanted -wisely and ironically- that Stephanie was an "Exquisite Corps" in all possible senses of the term.