WORLDVIEW

Milos Stehlik's Commentaries

	Milos Stehlik

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Here is an odd fact: Argentina, which suffered an economic meltdown a few years ago, has one of today’s most exciting national cinemas. Films are made for less than the wig budget for any of the Lord of the Rings trilogy. Yet many of the films are engaging and exciting. There are many young directors. Something is happening in film in Argentina.

Daniel Burman’s Lost Embrace, which won the top prize at last year’s Berlin International Film Festival, is one such wonderful Argentine treasure. It’s set in a broken-down shopping mall in Buenos Aires. The mall is full of little shops run by some unlikely, but very sharply drawn characters. At the center of the many intertwining relationships is Ariel and his mother, Sonia, who run a lingerie shop. Surrounding them are the Saliganis, an Italian family that runs an electronics store and is constantly screaming at each other at the top of their lungs. There are the Korean Kims who have a feng shui shop; Osvaldo, a stationery store owner; and Mitelman, a travel agent with a hot and lusty Lithuanian secretary.

Ariel, who comes from a Jewish emigrant family from Eastern Europe, has an identity crisis. He would like to be Polish, and so he agitates with his grandmother for documents that will help him reclaim Polish citizenship. He wants to become “European—like that Polish filmmaker who had trouble with a young girl”—a reference to Roman Polanski.

The father is absent. He abandoned the family when Ariel was just a baby and went off to Israel to fight in the 1973 war. Ariel's only image of Dad is a short home movie of Ariel’s circumcision.

What holds all of these unlikely characters together is gossip. Gossip is the glue that holds the various episodes together. Ariel starts a series of secret trysts with Rita, who owns an internet shop which is financed by a much older man that’s always hanging around the shop. But Ariel has trouble getting used to his mother, who has suddenly taken up with a new male suitor.

But Lost Embrace is more than a vividly captured slice of life in this predominantly Jewish community of Buenos Aires. It is often frenetic and funny. Its humor has a strong undercurrent of social and political critique. In one comic scene, Ariel tries to explain to the Polish consul why he wants to be Polish and get a Polish passport. “I love art,” he says, “especially Polish art.” Then, not being able to think of any Polish artists, he only mentions Lech Walesa whose name he mispronounces, and then, in a lightning inspiration, remembers Roman Polanski. Ariel’s identity quest is obviously a reflection of the identity-crisis of many Argentines and their quest for being cosmopolitan.

There is Rita, the new girlfriend. Ariel wants to find out her relationship to the old man who hangs around her shop and obviously gives her money. “Is he your father?” he asks her. “Sometimes,” says Rita. She has already told Ariel that “sometimes” is her favorite unit of time.

Lost Embrace may seem like a messy film for those who expect a single, coherent narrative strand. It is episodic and flits from one situation to another, seemingly without much aim. While Burman does tie the narrative strands together when Ariel’s father returns from Israel, the loose feeling of the film is actually one of its greatest charms. There is no rush to get somewhere. The pleasures of this film happen to be in the small and very human details.

This is Milos Stehlik for Chicago Public Radio’s Worldview.

Worldview film contributor Milos Stehlik is the director of Facets Multimedia.

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