Play

I loved Play. Beyond the usual archetype and in spite of the fablesque tone of the film one can finally experience a Latin American city as a real place. Confusion, nostalgia and resignation are universal.

In this film you will meet Tristan, a weak but sensitive architect who has been dumped by his girlfriend Irene, an immodest Chilean princess. You will also meet Cristina, a beautiful Mapuche girl with an i-pod. Both, Tristan and Cristina seem to be trapped in a process of self-denial. But it is in this process where both of them (almost) find themselves.

When you leave the theater, you will wish you know more about these characters and it is OK that we don't. The film's purposively non-exhaustive narrative creates a more subtle but deeper link between the characters and us in our enjoyable role as partial spectators.

I saw this film at the 2006 Palm Springs International Film Festival and of the 35 films I saw there this made my top 10. If this is Director Sherson's directorial debut for a feature film she came out of the gate with a good one. The Christina character has little if any dimension to her which you wouldn't think could work in movie for the principal character to be but it works. The video arcade playing, I-pod listening Christina somehow creates her own game to a beat and lyrics of her own as she bounces around the city like a pinball. A good look to this film and good soundtrack with some good characters. It's got some of the somberness of Ingmar Bergman and some of the artistic fantasy of Federico Fellini in this film. I would give it an 8.0 on a scale of 10 and recommend it but maybe not to a general audience movie-goer.

Thirty-two-year-old Chilean filmmaker Alicia Scherson has made an extraordinarily accomplished and delightful first feature. Let's not try to start out by declaring what it's "about": it's too rich and delicate for that to be anything but a travesty. Let's just mention that Play won the Best New Narrative Filmmaker award at the Tribeca festival a year ago but still has no US distribution -- and hence, its appearance at the upcoming 49th San Francisco International Film Festival (SFIFF). Fresh, rich in invention, sure in its unique tone, Play is a significant addition to world cinema and marks Alicia Scherson out as one of Latin America's exciting new filmmakers. It deserves to be widely seen. Like all great filmmakers, Scherson knows well how important time is -- how a movie is all about time -- and can play the game of time. In Play we're always in the present, always absorbed; the game is always in play.

If Play seems to be about "nothing," look again. Antonioni's L'Avventura and Fellini's La dolce vita were about "nothing" too. Scherson has modulated Antonioni's boredom into bemused loneliness and Fellini's wealthy idleness into a twenty-first century urban anomie of easy meetings and easy separations. But again, the generalizations feel wrong and should be held till much later. Clearly Scherson sees life with a precision and wit even the greatest directors might envy.

In a way the real protagonist of Play is the city of Santiago, Chile. Scherson conceived her film, in which several people wander around the city, when on a Fulbright in Chicago, thinking about Santiago. Her male protagonist, Tristán (Andres Ulloa), wakes up in the arms of his wife Irene (Aline Kupperhein) feeling terribly sad. He goes to work -- he's an architect on a construction site but a strike is called and later he gets knocked down by a drunk, and loses consciousness after running into a post. Awakening in the street the next day with a scar on his head, he goes into what the French call a fugue -- wandering around the city, getting drunk, no longer quite caring who he is -- and seeming to lose his identity, since he isn't working, he isn't with his wife or at home, and around a dive bar he has begun to frequent people keep mistaking him for somebody named "Walter." He spends the night in his old room at the house of his blind, charming mother, (the very accomplished Coca Guazzini) who now has a hunky magician living with her (Jorge Allis).

Meanwhile Cristina (Viviana Herrera), a young Indian woman from the southern hinterland whose "story" the movie follows from the start in parallel with Tristán's, is paid to care for Milos (Francisco Copello) an old, ill Hungarian man. Out for a walk, she comes across the abandoned briefcase of Tristán in a dumpster and at once lays out its contents and begins smoking his cigarettes and lighting them with his lighter and listening to his MP3 with his big headphones. Cristiana is sweet but a loner, walking a lot, playing the "flippy" Japanese video games in the center of town. An observer, she wants to return the briefcase, but she can't resist taking time to analyze its contents first and winds up stalking Tristán and secretly, invisibly, partially inhabiting his now disoriented life. In the meantime she cares for her sick man, reading to him from the National Geographic about an Amazonian tribe wiped out by invading white people. She goes on listening to music on Tristan's headphones and starts a running conversation with a sexy gardener, Manuel (J. Pablo Quezada), near Milos' building. (All Scherson's men are attractive, her women too.) A mercurial, honest fellow, as full of passion and life as Tristán is full of passionate ennui, the gardener likes Cristina, but declares her to be strange. At one point they start kissing, and then she immediately says goodbye and walks away.

Scherson mocks her own device of having Cristina follow Tristán and Irene at one point by having the three following each other, Indian file. She majored in biology in college, and she's above all a careful observer, neither making fun nor drawing heavy conclusions. Significant changes happen for both Tristán and Cristina before the movie ends. There are no conventional "resolutions." And yet things feel wonderfully resolved. It's a mark of Scherson's brilliance in design that even in the very last few minutes we're still curious to learn -- and learning -- important things about both the main characters -- yet can't really say for sure where they're going to go from here. The great thing is that through all the playful randomness of the narrative, we never lose our focus on the two contrasting moods of Tristán's lost melancholy and Cristina's busy but disoriented contentment with urban life.

The danger: extravagant praise, sinking the very film you like, by creating excessive expectations. The fact: expect all you want of Alicia Scherson's "Play" - you will not be disappointed.

This brilliant film from Chile - to be shown at the SF International Film Festival, April 23, 26, 28 and May 3 - is bulletproof. As it follows the potentially/actually interlinking lives of ordinary but wonderfully interesting people in Santiago, you watch with amazement how a film can be so *right* in every way. If you don't get drawn into it, if you don't relish its quirky (and yet totally real) characters, if you are not amazed by Ricardo de Angelis' cinematography, the problem is with you, not with the film.

De Angelis (of many films, including "El buen destino," "Sueños atómicos," and "Pedile a San Antonio") is a genius, plain and simple. Seemingly each single frame is fascinating, meaningful, curious - and yet not one of them impedes the relentless (if effortless-looking) forward movement of "Play." Great cinematographers are often guilty of self-importance and self-indulgence; not de Angelis - he is serving the film. A genius.

The director, at 32, is half of de Angelis' age, and her track record of only two other films ("Baño de mujeres" and "Crying Underwater") is a fraction of the cinematographer's. It doesn't matter. She has the eye, the mind, the heart, both the caring and the discipline to create a thoroughly splendid work. The Santiago-born biologist went to film school in Cuba, came the US on a Fulbright, recently moved back to Chile.

Here comes the part I hate: what is the film "about"? Ugh. Good films are like good people - not "about" something, but good existentially, in themselves, just the way they are. Still, one cannot escape the linear, obvious responsibility of narration. And that's exactly where Scherson is so good: she deals with the "about," the story, the nuts-and-bolts, but she does it in an always-interesting, attractive, sophisticated way, but never fancy, never artsy.

"Play" follows (very closely, but not intrusively, in de Angelis' photography) two people: a young mapuche woman from central Chile, living in the capital as a caretaker servant for an elderly man, and Tristan, a heartbroken - or just plain broken - young man, rejected, lonely, helpless.

NO: They do not fall into each other's arms. NO: they do not walk off into the sunset. NO: they don't end up as tragedians in Tristan-und-Isolde fashion. Scherson doesn't write formula, she speaks of life, real life, which is manifested - almost always, except for moments of illumination and peak experience - between the unformed and the unformulated. Her actors are magnificent: Vivana Herrera and Andrés Ulloa are just as real and believable as the characters they play, and they are surrounded by a large cast of professional actors and passersby - I wonder if you can distinguish between them. (Exception: the hero's wildly sensual blind mother and her obnoxious magician lover are obviously well-trained, professional actors.)

Scherson's style is a seamless combination of realism, flashbacks that illuminate, "little things" which gain in significance both on the screen and within the viewer, shifting perspectives, and straightforward story-telling. NO: none of this is obvious or distracting. While you watch "Play," you see only the story, the characters therein. Complexity and sophistication come to the fore only when reflecting on what it was that "got you."

The idea for "Play" came to Scherson in Chicago, where "being a foreigner gave me new insight into the way we define ourselves as inhabitants of a specific place. The more the world connects through the global economy and technology, the more this definition and this awareness of identity becomes diffuse and complex. How do people deal with coming from a strong ancient culture but living a life that has nothing to do with it?

"Is a native mapuche girl that lives in the city supposed to feel more identified with her grandmother from the rainy south than with her favorite heroine of Japanese video games? Cities are like game boards where rules are to be discovered and change from neighborhood to neighborhood. Urban players have to find the right role to be able to get up every morning and be apart of the game during the whole day."

While this is illuminating, it could also be slightly off-putting. Glory be, when you see "Play," there is no agenda or subtext anywhere on the horizon, "just" one terrific movie. Hie and get to the nearest theater where "Play" unspools.

The usage of HD video not only pays, but a nice photography results on a wonderful picture. The film uses vivid colors and spaces, a really clear and different vision of Santiago, Chile. The story is very urban, uses this city at its maximum. Note that Santiago is not a giant international metropolis, but a nice city, capital of the small 16 million people country in which I proudly live. It is a city full of different, tiny flavors, and "Play" really succeeds on showing it.

The storyline, though, is quite plain... and, to be honest, boring. Nothing happens, and even with that beautiful look, the movie made me think while watching...

"what time is it?"