Rojo

A bad, boring film which wastes the talent of Grandinetti. Make better use of your time by watching another film . This is total nonsense and includes a very gratuitous and grotesque scene where a bull is castrated, which is not in any way essential to the film's plot. Also included is a scene where a record with an A&M label plays on a record player while Camilo Sesto's Quieres Ser Mi Amante is heard. Camilo Sesto's music was never released on A&M. He recorded for Ariola, which later became part of the BMG conglomerate. A&M Records was an American record label that had absolutely no connection with Ariola or BMG, and is now part of the Universal Music Group. Por favor!

Summer movie season has arrived in NYC. I can always tell by the higher quality of the foreign films that come to town (you can bet none of the Hollywood films are of high quality). "Rojo" is the best film I've seen since at least the winter and I can't remember which one that was. This one features good acting and camera work and with some thought-provoking allegory and symbolism.

Nutshell: An influential lawyer is slowly losing his ethical footing after a confrontation with an unbalanced patron at a restaurant, leading to a visit from an amateur detective investigating the disappearance of the patron. Give it a chance, because it is slow to get underway. But if you appreciate superior filmmaking there is always a reward with a good motion picture, and this is one example.

******** 8/10 - Website no longer prints my star rating.

I saw this at MOMA this past January and as I see it is up on video now I thought I'd summarize. The period in question is the nasty Isabel Peron dictatorship and the equally nasty dictatorship that replaced it. Disappearing people had been occurring in Latin America for hundreds of years and this period was no different. That is one of the underlying themes, and one of the few scenes that worked is a scene of local people going to a home and emptying it of anything of any value. It reminded me of a scene in Kazantzakis' Zorba where the moment the ageing widow dies, all of the town turns up to calmly steal everything not nailed down. The film also has some brief moments of great cinematography. It also is clearly influenced by Fargo, True Detective and some aspects of Scandinavian noir, although wihtout the depth, dark humor, or coherence.

Ultimately though. Rojo. is entirely incoherent. it not only fails to tell a meaningful story, it fails to tell an intelligible one. it is a tedious experience to watch it, with no reward at all for the audience.

The beginning is awesome, there is a fantastic noir atmosphere, cinenatogphy is inspired, script is very wrll written (at least most of the time). However, the end is not in the same level of the film's development, and perhaps sone open parallel stoties should have had an end. Though, it is a good layered film and deals seriously with a horrible time in Latin American history.

It's a pretty well-acted movie with a good period context and pretty good photography. But the script is empty, very empty. The end comes to nothing and everything that happens during the movie ends in nothing. This is not good Argentine cinema, it is one of the weakest films I have seen.