This afternoon Justine and I were uninspired by the movie listings and made a choice I've often lacked the discipline to make: we went to see an unknown Argentinian film being shown in a Boston MFA series. Every day there are a few unknown films showing there, and their projection is amazing. Together with the Harvard Film Archive, the Brattle Theatre and the Coolidge Corner, this is a venue that makes Boston a pretty decent town for movie-going.
Momentos (incorrect plot description on this link, I submitted a right one - cast and crew is correct) was SO worth the trip. I consider myself a movie buff, yet my education is really 80-90% American, the rest being in general only the most obvious international exemplars. Watching this film, a carefully hewn, emotionally truthful marital-infidelity tale from 1981, made me wonder how many classics I am missing out on.
It is the tale of Lucia, who looks about 40 and has a big $20 haircut that kind of levitates throughout the picture. She's married to older Mauricio, and lets herself be seduced by the younger (and very virile) Nicolas, a car-salesman. At first Nicolas seems like the love-em and leave-em type who's looking for a quick lay with an experienced older woman. When they decamp in the middle of winter for Mar Del Plata, a desolated beach town, the expectations are reversed as Lucia begins to tune out from her passion for Nicolas, and into the coruscating memories of her first marriage, to Sebastian. We come to see Nicolas as an attempt to replace Sebastian, and he seems shallower and shallower as their beachside tryst starts to look lonelier and more like an ordinary relationship.
In the end this came across to me as a pretty deep reflection on the nature of marital ties, the consequences of betrayal, and the way traumatizing memories continue to condition our romances decades after their sting has apparently faded. Rohmer tells stories like this one, but director Maria Luisa Bemberg (noted in the MFA film calendar as Argentina's first female film director) elicits more of her tale from her actor's faces than from their words. The territory of female transgression, remorse and regret is traversed along paths frequented by Bergman.
The print was excellent, and after the showing Justine and I, not having read a thing about the movie beforehand, tripped out on how we had NO clue when it had been shot. It was clearly SET in the 80's or thereabouts, but when was it made? I guessed '91, with a minimum of '85 and a max of 2003. Justine pretty immediately said seventies, but eventually guessed '85. It was like, well, if it was made today it was a big-budget picture because they had every prop, setting, costume and haircut perfect to the era, which I thought was mid-80's. There were even multiple outdoor scenes with buildings and cars and stuff. So I figured, OK, Argentina in '91 could have looked pretty solidly eighties.
The thing that made this very confusing was exactly the way in which Bemberg seemed to fixate on the very ephemeral stylistic qualities of the era. Tacky dance music, haircuts, architecture, and even video games were carefully framed in what seemed like irony. That made me think it was a period piece. It turned out that, like Rohmer, Bemberg is just fascinated, and sufficiently removed from, the trendinesses of her time -- perhaps because, like Rohmer, she made films late into her life. This, her first, was produced when she was already 58.