mariorabey

In its new film, Leonardo Favio brings to us -as always it does- a pure, simple and magical story where it turns to the Romance of the Aniceto and the Francisca (Romance del Aniceto y la Francisca), that he had filmed forty years ago. This new version is a ballet wonderfully performed and filmed in simple but realistic designed scenes. Like in most of Favio's great films, any spectator can locate the story in the time: the car that occupies the scene in the first sequence says clearly in which decade we are. Shortly, almost no other temporary reference appears, except for a Wawanco's classic cumbia, that says -in addition to the decade in which the story occurs- that we are in some place of South America. The irrigation channel, with its floodgate next to the car, gives a more clear-cut location: a desert zone with irrigation. As people speak Spanish, it may be located either in Chile, either in the Cuyo region or in the Andean Northwest, both Argentina. But the speech is Argentine, so there no doubt, we are in Cuyo, either in Mendoza or San Juan Provinces: the region where were born and early raised Favio and its brother, the author of the tale on which the script of Aniceto is based. So, in five minutes, we know when and where the film story occurs. The film, technically speaking, is a filmed ballet, which scores are based to a great extent on Argentine popular music, mainly tango. So it is a filmic ballet, the sort that the Spanish director Carlos Saura, another great film-maker, cultivates very frequently. But Favio enlightens a new magic: his dance performers, besides to dancing outstandingly well some great choreographies, act like real professional actors. Hernán Piquín - the Aniceto-, Natalia Pelayo - immortalizing the Francisca- and Alejandra Baldoni - the Lucia- put in evidence the difference between the drama and the tragedy. Because in the real great cinema (like Bergman, Fellini, Pasolini, Welles, Kazan, Trier, Herzog, and so on), never there is drama, but there is tragedy, no doubt Aniceto is a great film. And as it must be in the tragedy, it is possible from the beginning to known in what historical and cultural territory passes its story, a story that is also a universal one.

In 1958, Argentine film-maker Lucas Demare releases this film, that installs in the social imaginary a subject that came to be explored by Bernardo Verbitzky, in its novel "Villa Miseria también es América" ("Misery Village also is America"), published in 1957. Literature and the cinema thus go ahead, in almost fifteen years, to the interest devoted by social sciences just from the beginning of the '70s to the spontaneous settlements of urban working class. This interest was pioneered by the work of anthropologist Hugo Ratier,"Villas and villeros", published at Buenos Aires in 1971 by the Centro Editor de América Latina.

Looking to this last film of one of the greater Argentine film-makers, not discussed father of the Argentinean New Wave, you can introduce yourself in many of the clues, not only of this country's cinema, but in the ideas and cultural biases of the Buenos Aires intellectuals at the sixties and seventies. Torre Nilsson puts together in this film several of the many profound issues he explores in his filmography. Firstly, there is a new picture of one of his preferred subjects, i.e., the ruling classes of his country, mainly based on landownership. Secondly, he explores sexuality on a fine manner, linking it with death and charm in a non-bizarre way. Finally, the ambiguous realism that links Torre Nilsson to Fellini blows up in the strange end of the film.