Nandan’s Spanish film festival kicked off with two South American films. Aside from the soil from which they sprang, Eduardo Mignogna’s ‘Cleopatra’ and Sergio Cabrera’s ‘The Art of Losing’ could not have been more disparate creations. While Cabrera offers a raunchy, wry expose of Columbian corruption, ‘Cleopatra’ - with its Thelma and Louise-style narrative - wishes only to reveal the innate freedom of the human soul.
Sergio Cabrera is famed for falling in with guerillas in his native Colombia - to fall out several years later in order to pursue his directorial ambitions. With this in mind, you can’t help sensing a worldly gaze behind ‘The Art of Losing’s portrait of a Colombia infested with casual violence and underworld connections.
Victor Silampa (Daniel Gimenez Cacho) is your textbook journalist: world-weary, booze-sozzled, recently dumped by the love of his life. But when Victor is given the case of an impaled man left by the side of a scenic lake, we’re introduced to a not-so-predictable whirlwind of prostitutes, nudists, adulterous lawyers and corrupt oligarchs. ‘The Art of Losing’ proceeds to unveil how all are involved in the scramble for 400 acres gruesomely flagged by the afore-mentioned corpse.
Cabrera is noted for his playful handling of weighty material, and ‘The Art of Losing’ takes some beautifully off-the-wall stabs at Colombia’s institutionalized hypocrisy. Unfortunately, too much of the film’s comedic energy is channeled into Victor’s block-headed sidekick, leaving others playing second fiddle with decidedly lack-lustre dialogue.
Overall, ‘The Art of Losing’ takes a satisfyingly quirky look at Colombia’s seedy underbelly. Weighed down by a weakness for cut-and-paste characters, ‘The Art of Losing’ is at least packed with plenty of race and pace. And if nothing else grabs you, the film’s brazen sexiness (championed by Victor’s love-interest, played by the nubile Martina Garcia) is likely to keep you glued to your seat.
Mignogna’s ‘Cleopatra’ couldn’t be further in tone from Cabrera’s flick, where every woman character is a prostitute. In fact, ‘Cleopatra’ could fit snugly in the feminist canon, focusing as it does on the unlikely two-some of a young soap star and a retired teacher as they swap their men and commitments for a frivolous weekend jaunt. But before you spend the film anticipating cliff-edge disaster, Cleopatra (Norma Aleandro) and Sandra (Natalia Oreiro) are no gun-toting Thelma and Louise. With the Argentinian countryside as breath-taking backdrop, their mother-daughter relationship is tenderly drawn out in a narrative characterized by insight and poignancy, not dramatics.
While ‘The Art of Losing’s vision of Colombia is clearly set for an ending where all good apples turn rotten, ‘Cleopatra’s twists and tangents keep us on our toes. Finally, here’s a roadtrip flick that resists the lure of fantasy. It’s a little convenient, sure, that the two are picked up by the gorgeous but troubled cowboy Carlos (Leonardo Sbaraglia) – another ‘T and L’ echo - but Sandra’s new love interest is refreshingly fallable. And to its credit, Mignogna resists the lure of the winsome couple and remains firmly centred on Cleo, the disillusioned but optimistic aging mother, played with infectious gaiety by Norma Aleandro.
Cambrera and Mignogna’s native Colombia and Argentina are a continent apart, and so are these films in both subject and spirit. With only a limited line-up, it seems Nandan was wise to have chosen such polar works for its inaugural day. Though the task of representing South American film in an evening is undoubtedly impossible, ‘The Art of Losing’ and ‘Cleopatra’ did their best to breach the expanse.
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