"Picado Fino" is Esteban Sapir's first feature (to date he has only directed two movies, this one and the critically acclaimed "La Antena". Makes me wonder why, lack of funds perhaps? After all his movies do not precisely fit on the 'popular' category). Produced between 1993 and 1995 with very limited budget and premiered only in 1998, it's not only one of the first but also one of the finest examples of the Nuevo Cine Argentino (NCA) from the 90s that gave us directors such as Lucrecia Martel, Pablo Trapero, Adrian Caetano, Lisandro Alonso, Martin Rejtman and Ezequiel Acuna among others. This is a fragmentary movie, far from a typical narrative, introduces elements in terms of editing that may fairly remind to the work of Jean-Luc Godard, but with a sense of the bizarre and the obscure that personally referred me to David Lynch or even Fritz Lang (the similitudes with Lang are perhaps more evident in "La Antena"). Here we follow the avatars of Tomas (the late Facundo Luengo, who was killed by a truck shortly after finishing filming, a circumstance that devastated Sapir, who couldn't go on with editing for some time after he found out), who finds out that his girlfriend is pregnant and dreams with leaving to "the countries of the north" while struggles to face his new responsibilities and gets a job as a dealer. But all of this would have no importance without the particular way to build a structure that Sapir has, the few and oblique dialog, the use of separators with neon symbols and traffic signals, the "associative" editing (for instance, in one of the shots, a man gets his fingers into Tomas' sister's private parts, and in the subsequent shot we see -and listen to- Tomas breaking the aluminum cover of a yogurt with his thumb, then drinking it and, in the process, daubing his nose and mouth with the white, creamy substance). Oblique, obscure, with a good amount of sense of humor, fragmentary (Joyce's "Ulysses" is a leitmotiv of the movie: a particularly funny scene shows us Tomas reading it while sitting on the toilet), "Picado Fino" is a movie that easily could have been kept in secret by its creator (who first thought of it more as an essay and not to be publicly released). We are lucky it didn't.
