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WHISKY AND LA FIEBRE DEL LOCO/LOCO FEVER

Nobody actually drinks the stuff in Whisky (2004; 94 minutes), a droll, non-romantic comedy from Uruguayan directors Juan Pablo Rebella and Pablo Stoll. It’s the word the photographer asks Jacobo and Marta to say to get them to smile for their "wedding" picture. The relationship is as forced as the smile. Jacobo, the glum proprietor of a Montevideo sock factory, has asked his desiccated assistant, Marta, to pose as his wife when his more successful brother, Herman, comes visiting from Brazil on the first anniversary of their mother’s death.

This deviation looks like no match for the pair’s intransigent routine. The filmmakers employ a Jim Jarmusch–like deadpan minimalism to tick off the repeated scenes from Jacobo and Marta’s pre-Herman everyday life: opening the graffiti’d grate to the shop, fiddling with the broken office blind, checking the bags of the workers when they leave, locking up. But Marta seems game for a makeover: she fixes her hair, applies make-up, cleans up Jacobo’s apartment. If nothing else, she makes an impression on the still vinegary Herman, who when his allotted time at Jacobo’s ends invites the pair to a supremely tacky off-season seaside resort. Will its delights penetrate Jacobo’s irresolute pissed-off demeanor and enable him to break him out of his prison of sibling rivalry, Oedipal suffocation, and determined unhappiness? Although mannered in style and clockwork in structure, Whisky saves a surprising kick for the end.

A similar pro forma coupling distinguishes Chilean director Andrés Wood’s La fiebre del loco (2001; 94 minutes). A fly-specked padre at the end of the world in Patagonia entertains the locals on the church’s radio station with a soap opera called Endless Love. His ancient housekeeper takes on all the female parts. Could her performance be more than role playing?

This is one of the many beguiling digressions in the tale of Canuto and Jorge, two local losers who return to their home town to participate in the annual orgy of fishing that transforms the place on the one day that the government lifts the ban on the "loco," an endangered mollusk and aphrodisiac delicacy that commands astronomical prices in Japan. For a this brief moment, the money, the booze, and the floozies flow, traveling salesmen rake it in, and the padre plans renovations to the church in a bacchanal that is half carnival and half gold rush. In short, the scene is the opposite of that of Whisky, and though the two buddies’ central story might be predictable, the debauched and vital imagery and such flaky subplots as that of Endless Love give this Fever its heat. Both films are in Spanish with English subtitles.

BY PETER KEOUGH

Issue Date: March 4 - 10, 2005
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