jtaboada

This is a kid who gets all the money he wants (he can even wake his parents up in the middle of the night to ask for money, no problem), who goes regularly to brothels at age 13, who takes piano, tennis and karate lessons and doesn't seem to enjoy neither. And we are supposed to care for him because he has a fierce acne attack (for which, after seeing several specialists, he is taking the most expensive medicine in the market, without much improvement) and because he has never kissed a girl? Character identification really fails in this movie, and there's not much of an ironic distance, either.

Neither we learn much about the Jewish community in Montevideo, which is the supposed cultural backdrop. Well, maybe we do learn a couple of things: that they do fairly well, and that your classmates will laugh at you if your father happens to be a bricklayer.

This is not a badly made movie, only a pointless one.

What do you know about your great-grandfather? At best, some fragmented memories that you received from others. Now, imagine that your great-grandfather was the president of the country and you want to make a film about him. What do you do? The only thing you have are some old audio tapes where the president's daughter tries, not very successfully, to remember and portrait her father, and you don't really have any of the privileged access that one would assume for being a part of the family. This is the challenge that Natalia Almada had to face for this film.

Almada approaches the problem with grace and intelligence. More filled with questions than answers, the director tries to look at the past, as much as possible: she includes a good amount of historical footage, looks at period newspapers, and gets the most of the old tapes. But she also is at all times looking at the present, exploring the fascinating carnival and chaos that Mexico city is today. For some strange reason, the two lines of the documentary, the past and the present, although almost belonging to two different movies, end up matching quite well. It is the magic of film, or at least, of Almada's film.

Personally, I don't like bullfighting, but I don't hate it either, and that's what sort of happens to me with this film. The real story -with generous amounts of fiction, I suppose- of Mexican bullfighter Luis Procuna, from his childhood dreams to his initiation and consecration in the arena, from the terrible hazards of the job to the overcoming of the adversities and triumphal return. Half fiction, half documentary, it has a good mix of both, but otherwise is a simple story of success without interesting twist. The best parts are the ferocious spectators that are much harder to tame that the bull itself, and the sequence of the bullfighter's fear that keeps him far the bulls for a long time.