2024-10-11 03:33:40
With the first section of his filmography, the one that goes from A chrysanthemum bursts in five corners (1997) until The broken hug (2003), Daniel Burman became one of the most relevant references of what was once the New Argentine Cinema. His work continued with six feature films released every two or three years until 2016, when he followed the path of many other colleagues who moved away from cinema to venture into the field of platform series. (Edhaof Netflixand the very good Iosi, the repentant spyof Prime Video), in addition to the daily strip (Little Victorybroadcast here by Telefé). But that distancing, although prolonged, was never intended to be definitive. The one in charge of cutting the eight year drought without a movie it is Transmitzvahwhich has as protagonists Juan Minujin and the Spanish Penelope Guerrero.
“I realized how much I missed cinema when I returned. Making films is a party, a gift of life. One says ‘well, there are similar things’, but no: we are a group of people sitting in a row and looking at the same thing. It’s like all life stops and is there. In fact, every time I watch the trailer I remember where I was in each shot and even what I was wearing. Behind every shot there are moments of life. Afterwards, you may like the film more or less, you may connect or not, but they are fragments of truth about a group of people,” the director reflects to Page/12 during the interview conducted with Minujín, who in the fiction exhibited for the first time in the framework of one of the parallel sections of the Cannes Film Festival plays Eduardo Singer.
Insecure and stuck in the mud of a family and work life that does not satisfy him, Eduardo is the older brother of someone who used to be Rubén and is now Mumy, a true Yiddish song celebrity who emigrated to Spain and, as a result of a family event, is forced to return to her native Buenos Aires after two decades. He does it with a new gender identity and the desire to settle accounts with the past by taking the Bar Mitzvah. Or, since she’s a woman, should it be the Bat Mitzvah? With Alejandra Flechner, Alejandro Awada, Gustavo Bassani, Itzik Cohen y Carla Quevedo in supporting roles, Transmitzvah uses the ritual preparations as an excuse for a trip to the identity reaffirmation, understood as something much broader than gender. A journey that includes Jewish humor, dramatic comedy steps, the trace of discovery of a road movie and even some musical numbers with songs composed by Burman and his co-writer, Ariel Gurevich.
The question of identity is not new in Burman’s creative corpus. On the contrary, it is one of the common threads. The question of filial bond, For his part, he had already been at the center of the scene two brothers (2010), with Antonio Gasalla and Graciela Borges. “It seemed interesting to me to return to that theme, which has to do with brotherly love and the idea that brothers always argue and maintain their conflicts as if they were children. I liked to think about two very different brothers, one very successful and another who lives in a limbo very far from adulthood and who has to make small movements in his family that seem minimal to the outside, but to him they are enormous. Eduardo was completely trapped in the web of filiation and his sister, completely self-expelled. Between the two they begin to travel a path that has an intersection point where there is love, hate, conflict and, finally, redemption”, says the director, who wanted to “do a luminous film “That makes you leave the cinema better than you entered.”
-At the Cannes Festival you said that the idea of transition in Transmitzvah It didn’t have so much to do with gender, but with the passage from childhood to adulthood.
Daniel Burman: -Yes, it is the mother and father of all transitions. And it is a great disappointment. I remember a lot when I was a teenager and one day I realized I was an adult and I felt like that. But we all know that no, that we are one fakerschildren forced to act in roles that were given to us or that we dreamed of, but always from a childish place. There’s like an impostor syndrome in adulthood where you never really feel like an adult. But, at the same time, it is a path that must be crossed to know who we are. You may not be an adult, but you are something.
-It is a question that perhaps does not have a definitive answer.
D. B.: -Yes, and that is why one of the characters goes through a successful transition, in the sense that their body, their sensations and their gender identity are aligned. But that’s not the conflict of the film. The conflict is more related to two brothers who have to do with what they do with their line of affiliation, with everything they rejected to follow their dreams and how many times it is necessary to go looking for it. In the case of Juan’s character, it is added that he cannot reject anything because He doesn’t know what he wants to be.
-Juan, how did you work on that “not knowing what it wants to be” from an interpretive point of view?
Juan Minujín: -Eduardo is denied the idea that he can do something different from the path that was set out for him, a path diametrically different from that of his sister. She has a desire, she goes forward and takes the world by storm. He has a courage that his brother does not. He doesn’t even have the time to tell his wife that he’s going to be half an hour late. That duo, that contrast, seemed nice to me. And I also found it interesting that Eduardo takes an issue that is not his, in principle, and turns it into a personal cause. Since these characters have a hard time doing something for themselves, but not so much for others, they put everything into the sister’s celebration. That makes him able to mobilize himself.
-In some interviews you said that you are not religious, but that you believe that there are issues that exceed you. What was it like to get involved in a film with religion as a constituent element of the characters?
J. M.: -I worked with someone from a temple who helped me a lot. I went several times to do Shabbat and, in addition, I reconnect with the Jewish side of my father’s family. In some way, it was taking up several things. When I did The two Popes I knew much less, so I had to learn things from tradition. That was a kind of background that was going around and it was important to have. But the movie kind of “uses” that as an excuse to talk about other things. I would say that the religious thing was the easiest to resolve. The most complex, as always, is understand how the character thinks and why he does what he does.
-And did you understand how he thinks and why he does what he does?
J. M.: -Sometimes yes and sometimes no. The guidelines for my character are that it is very difficult for him to make a decision and at the same time he loves and admires his sister. For him, being with her is like being with Paul McCartney, with someone from another world. Feel the weight of roles in families whereby there is one child who is there to shine and another who is there to be behind.
-How did Penélope Guerrero get into the cast?
D. B.: -She had done a couple of series for platforms, and the casting director had told me it was her. I didn’t know her, but she did a spectacular casting, working from an interesting place. It was not from beauty, body or sensuality, but from an interior and very broken place, which gave the character something quite particular. I saw a lot of truth in what I was looking for and, above all, I didn’t see any imposition. I wanted the gender issue not to be in the foreground, and there was something about her that went beyond body, appearance and beauty.
-Did she participate in the final part of the script?
D. B.: -Yes, it has to do with his character. I, obviously, did not go through a gender transition process nor do I have anyone close to me who has. Yes ok I do not believe in the political correctness of the “authoritative voice” and all that, yes there was a question of respect and knowledge in construction. I mean, I can build a character very well regardless of whether it is a woman, man or trans, but there is a core related to the body and a very complex process that I did not go through. She gave me a first-person view essential to the construction of Mumy.
What was it like working with her, considering that she didn’t have as much experience as Juan and the rest of the cast?
J. M.: -It was very much in the hands of Daniel, in the sense that he was very clear about what he wanted to tell about the relationship between those two brothers. And it was trying to find the complicity between them without forcing it.
D. B.: -It is very complex to achieve complicity that is not obvious. The brother does not have to wink or anything, but complicity has to occur in a way implicitinvisible. I am very happy with the work of both of them, both individually and separately. And Juan made a very important contribution to the script that exceeded his character. At this point in life I really enjoy working with actors who can provide those types of elements.
J. M.: -Both in the case of Penelope as in that of any actor with more or less experience, it is about listening more than speaking and seeking to impose how I want things to be. It is seeing where the flow of the situation comes from and accompanying it. If that is achieved, there is already a large percentage gained. Afterwards, you can do it better or worse, tell more or less what you want to tell, but there is something that makes it work if you listen. Sometimes working with actors or actresses who have less experience is easier because there is less trickery, less pulling, less “this is how it is.”
-There are several moments focused on surreal comedy, such as the musical scenes or the situations with the “Mumys”, which break with the general tone of the film. What were you looking for with that?
D. B.: -The film proposes a displacement of reality because it’s a fable and because today’s reality is unbreathable. I wanted to make a bright film, and the musical moments are a respite. There the word would not reach nor have sufficient emotional precision to demonstrate what is happening. There are a couple of musicals that tell things. They are three original songs in Yiddish that we wrote with Ariel Gurevich, the screenwriter, and they tell important moments of the characters. They are luminous breaths to be able to return to the course of history.
-Had you already written songs before?
D. B.: -My dream since I started working in cinema was write a song Not in Yiddish, but then I liked the idea. Yiddish is a language fruit of the diaspora whose literature and music have not been renewed much. It seemed like a very interesting challenge to me. It was very playful dream the songs, write them and make them.