|
| |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Like his title protagonist, Chilean director Sebastián Alarcón brims with whimsy, vitality, and big, contradictory ideas. Simón Cortázar (Daniel Muñoz) may earn his bread snapping trashy photos for a Valparaíso tabloid, but his dream is to produce a "fotonovela" melding reality with art, a fusion of Nietzsche and Descartes, and that’s just the start. For now, all he has on his side is the help of his fellow moochers at Mercedes’s boarding house and the faith of a naive young girl who wants to be a star. Add to that a wretched set in an attic and a city bursting with World Cup fever (the year is 1962, when Chile hosted the Cup, but Alarcón allows anachronisms like cell phones and digital cameras to creep in) and you have 90 minutes of pointed and obscure non-sequiturs. Simón believes that editing ruined film and photography as a mirror of uncut, unmediated reality, and of course his own work is completely artificial. (He even poses an accident victim before taking his picture for a better composition.) Alarcón’s direction resembles, at its best, the later Fellini, unreflectively self-reflective, peopled with clowns and grotesques and mirrors of the artist, a fantastic frieze that doesn’t quite conceal the vacancy beneath. In Spanish with English subtitles. (90 minutes)
BY PETER KEOUGH
|
