Rojo

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.

Yesterday evening, I took advantage of a French premiere within UGC Les Halles, in Paris, in the presence of the Argentine director Benjamín Naishtat who fluently spoke French with an almost-irreproachable accent. He confided us he was inspired by the detective movies (« polar » in French) of the 70's.

The film generally seems to be the mixture of two films from two distinct directors. The duels (all those involving Darío Grandinetti and / or Alfredo Castro) highlight an obvious cinematographic maturity based on an irreproachable photography and well-built dialogues. These scenes remind me of the excellent film El Clan (2015) which takes place a few years later, at the beginning of the 80's. Conversely, others scenes such as the rehearsal of the dance show are almost annoying and weirdly seem to come from another movie and from another director.

In summary, I'm rather disappointed with this slightly-muddleheaded movie, despite some excellent scenes. I'm nevertheless convinced that the next movie realized by Benjamín Naishtat will be better built. 4/5 of 10.

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.

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.