Bahía Blanca

Interesting and intelligent film noir, with a strong literary imprint, based on the homonymous novel by Martín Kohan, with an outstanding performance by Elisa Carricajo.

Review

Winner of the Best Performance Award (Elisa Carricajo) of the # BAFICI2021 International Official Competition.

Mario is a literature professor (Guillermo Pfening) who makes a trip to the city of Bahía Blanca, in the south of the province of Buenos Aires, to carry out a study on the essayist Ezequiel Martínez Estrada, who died in that city. A chance reunion will shed light on his past.

We could define this debut film by Rodrigo Caprotti, based on the homonymous novel by Martín Kohan, as a noir, characterized by a strong presence of the literary, especially in the dialogues it maintains with some of the characters, which generate an effect of artificiality or strangeness, depending on how you look at them. However, these seemingly trivial exchanges have a reason for being since they help to delineate the protagonist and resignify themselves after having seen the film.

From a certain moment, in a film that always has an unpredictable development, with that almost Lynchean estrangement, light is shed on the protagonist's past and the discourse and register of the story changes, abandoning its apparent drift and acquiring a strong directionality.

It is Elisa Carricajo who with an extraordinary performance manages to make that new discourse her own and breathe humanity into the troubled Mario and a film that leaves the viewer thinking and resignifying all its development.