2024-09-20 20:40:15
A group of friends, or maybe not so friends, meet in a modern ghetto: a country club in the Province of Buenos Aires, where comfort is everything what they seem to want. Until secrets, some dislikes, the past come to light. So, in this scenario, the question is no longer “what could go wrong,” but “can anything go right?”
In this double and metaphorical scenario, it is planted Veiled imagethe new work of Santiago Gobernori. The real setting where it has just been released is the Galpón de Guevara. The fictional setting is that which has been around for some time the philosopher Marc Augé called it a “non-place.”
Argentina, Buenos Aires: a country
It is not a ‘country’ as a transitory place, like an airport or a supermarket. And yet, within this group of “frenemies”, Interest in the past seems to be a deadly disease; it is better to avoid confronting history
In the midst of this reunion, of adults who behave like post-adolescents excited by drugs or like pseudo-intellectuals excited by quoting works and authors, there is a character that no one sees (only some) but who observes everyone. An Indian. There is no social subject, person, human being, more invisible (and uncivilized, of course) than the original inhabitant of what were the Pampas..
So in that scenario, the deployment happens: Gobernori-style humoras in that already classic of the Buenos Aires underground, “Los Solemnes” (the sketch series that he has directed for more than ten years together with Matías Feldman).
An original work with nods to classics
At this crossroads of mirrors Veiled image connect with the Luis Buñuel de The Exterminating Angel (the ambiguity between being able or not to leave the closed space, the barbecue area… of the social mentality), Viridian only here, it is not a beggar’s banquet, but a banquet of “chetos” made in north zone. And perhaps with the most perfect film of Leopoldo Torre Nilsson: The terracewith a book by Beatriz Guidowhere a group of good kids I was trapped on the roof of a building in Buenos Aires and it was cool.
But the similarities end there. And in that both The terrace (Graciela Borges, Leonardo Favio, Hector Pellegrini and Marcela Lopez Rey), as Veiled image They boast an unbeatable cast of young people. Among many high points, Marcos Ferrante He shines in his role as the owner of the house, a professional grill master. He is “the literal man”, unfazed by the rhetorical images and possibilities of ironic language – and why not, a close relative of Ezequiel Campa’s Dicky del Solar.
Also Julian Cabrera (“chimi, morsels, chinchus, proverbi… ‘chari'”) y Tincho Lupsilluminating presence of the one who has no voice or image. And Victoria Baldomirwho can tell everything with the speed of her steps, in a hurry, opening her eyes wide. Or acting, like great actresses, with her shoulders and her back. A brilliant decision in body positioning: Clara, her character, gives the back of her body – her back – to the past.
In that place, Veiled image, breathe and makes you laugh out loud. Between Sarmiento’s legacy or a realism that seems to have come out as if Martín Kohan had written a historical novel. And, above all, a very current vision of reality. With “castes” where there used to be tents. Of Indians, of course.
And another Argentina, of course. From the past. More innocent. More barbaric. And without fences of private neighborhoods.