Wind with the Gone

This is one of the greatest movies I´ve ever seen. If you like cinema, you´ll like it as much I did. It´s funny, but it´s also touching. It´s a movie about people who see movies, but essencially a film about people... and movies.

The first time I got acquainted with the work of Alejandro Agresti was his movie 'Buenos Aires Vice Versa', a quite stunning movie about day-to-day life in Argentina. His next movie 'La Cruz' proved a more funny effort, but with 'El viento se llevo lo que' (in Dutch 'Door de wind gejaagd') Agresti paints a portrait of an isolated village in Argentina, whose only contacts with the outside world (i.e. the capital) are the movies that are brought in by motor. The cinema is like the central place to be. The village is populated by a bunch of very eccentric people with their own little histories. The arrival of a young woman and an old, renowned actor (who featured in most of the movies the village people have seen) set the place ablaze and very soon things start happening... Very good acting, warm characters, beautiful panoramic views of the landscape and some nice humor make up for a nice viewing experience. And underneath it all the attentive viewer can detect some cultural and political criticism too, which adds some bonus value to this movie.

Rio Pico is a little town, not far away from Buenos Aires, but nothing really happens over there and the population is in no way ahead of the modern things in the world. When Soledad (Vera Fogwill), a female taxi driver from Buenos Aires, got stuck in the town by a car accident, things are changing. It was never the goal from Soledad to stay in the village but she got embraced by the inhabitants who are asking her to be the presenter of the local film journal which is shown in the local filmtheatre. The filmtheatre is the sole way the people have to escape from reality, even if all film copies are the ones who are rejected by the bigger Argentinian cities. "El viento se llevo lo que" (be translated as "Gone with the wind") is a hilarious top comedy that only got spoiled by the entrance of French actor Edgard Wexley (played by the overrated Jean Rochefort)who is the local film hero. Apart from that is "El viento se llevo lo que" a wonderful piece of world cinema in where director Alejandro Agresti (already a filmmaker in Argentinia since 1978) seeks a satisfying balance between hilarity and the hard truth. A South-American pearl that is recommended to anyone who loves world cinema.

a taxista in buenos aires one day gets bored with her life there and heads south in her taxi with no particular destination in mind other than keep heading to the extreme south of patagonia. so begins the film. the windswept plains and rolling hills, bleak and deserted create an atmosphere of delicious melancholia. she ends up the village at the end of the world, where the only contact people have with the outside world is via cinema -- a man on a motorbike comes there every couple weeks with a film whose 16 mm reels are all mixed up. the entire village gathers in the cinema in the plaza every evening to watch the film in a different order each night, and over time, most of the characters have become a bit eccentric as well. much of the film is about the lives of the people in the village. one day some trucks arrive and put up a TV tower. Henceforth the once bustling plaza, center of activity and coherence in the village is now empty, with the glow of TV in every window.. and maria soledad, the taxista decides its time for her to move on somewhere else.. a classic exposition of the argentine melancholy temperament. i wish i could buy the DVD somewhere.

The idea for this film is so promising - villagers on the outskirts of civilization experience the outside world through films that have been cut ut, respliced, etc. and behave in accordance with the results - yet the result is so mundane, yes boring. I would like to see how a master filmmaker - Orson Welles, Jean-Luc Godard, for example, come immediately to mind - would realize this film.

All in all, boring and a big disappointment. I left half way through it.