Original title: The Post · Stephen Spielberg · USA · 2017 · Script: Liz Hannah, Josh Singer · Performers: Meryl Streep, Tom Hanks, Bob Odenkirk…
Original title: Exist · Lucrecia Martel · Argentina · 2017 · Script: Lucrecia Martel · Interpreters: Daniel Gimenez Cacho, Matheus Nachtergaele, Lola Duenas…
In the last image of The Pentagon files, Katherine Graham (Meryl Streep), first female editor of the prestigious newspaper The Whasington Post, and its director, Ben Bradlee (Tom Hanks), They walk towards the back of the scene surrounded by the machines that form the newspaper's guts. The image refers us to that last shot of Casablanca in which Claude Rains and Humphrey Bogart also walked towards that horizon wrapped in fog with which the film closed. As in the Michael Curtiz classic, we could say that, in Steven Spielberg's film, After that last image a beautiful friendship had been born. The image has great evocative power, both for its composition (using a crane that rises above the characters), as within the margins of the argument that the film exposes. It is an image with clear epic connotations and, at the same time, deeply nostalgic. Behind the characters, The copies with the latest edition of the newspaper ascend towards the sky like a snake with the latest news of a major scandal that targets the administration of President Nixon's government. The war to conquer press freedom had begun and the first great battle was going to be settled with a resounding victory.. This is, at least, what Spielberg gives us to understand.
The first thing to celebrate about the director's latest production Encounters in the third phase We find it in the virtues of a script that masterfully links background and plot. It had been a long time since, as spectators, We didn't have the opportunity to enjoy such a well-constructed story.. We made reference in the previous paragraph to Curtiz's film and the relationship is not gratuitous, Well, if something characterized what we could call “classic Hollywood cinema” it was the care he put into the construction of his stories.. A healthy habit that the cinema mainstream modern American seems to have forgotten for too many decades (hence it has been losing prestige in the eyes of a good part of critics and viewers.). In this sense, Liz Hannah y Josh Singer, credited authors of the script on which this feature film is based, They have done a solid job, seamless, that manages to keep the viewer hooked from the beginning until its resolution.
But, as every good movie buff already knows, A good script can always be ruined if it falls into the wrong hands.. It is not the case. heir and (back in the eighties of the last century) renovator of that same classical tradition, Spielberg takes Hannah and Singer's text to images with a very sure pulse. On a narrative level, we will not find in The Pentagon files a plane that stands out especially above the others nor any notable aesthetic pirouette. In fact, We would almost dare to say that this may be one of Spielberg's productions where his baton may be perceived with greater discretion.. As at the beginning of his career, the director of E.T. puts his knowledge at the service of the story to build a captivating thriller, drawn with a grammar without fanfare (beyond some coup d'effect to emphasize the surprise) but very effective when it comes to directing the emotions of the public. And this is no small thing.. From the first moment, We all sense how the conflict at stake here will end., but that does not prevent us from being trapped in the net that Spielberg is laying for us one sequence after another. An impeccable staging job, plus a refined assembly exercise (It is fair to highlight the work of editors Michael Kahn and Sarah Broshar) they successfully close the operation.
Screenwriter Aaron Sorkin suggested regarding the successful series The West Wing of the White House, that his work was not a realistic translation of the mechanisms of his country's politics. To be something, was an appropriate idealization to create entertaining fiction. And something similar happens here. Like in the Sorkin series, The Pentagon files It is an abstraction constructed to tie together a story and, with this, a message. And the strategy works very well. Spielberg puts on the table a question that, although it is in the past, concerns contemporary society: the need for a free press that confronts the always perfidious goings-on of those in power. Y, as we say, achieves its objective. Spielberg and his team wisely handle the tools of identification, making the war waged by its protagonists against the Nixon government our own war. Just open any newspaper (or take a look at their online versions) to empathize with that struggle undertaken by Katherine Graham and Ben Bradlee. A war against power, but also against ourselves, against our own responsibility in the face of the corruption of a system that finds its best ally in our fears. Swelled with pride, We left the room satisfied to find ourselves, for once, on the right side.
It's a pity that, in the last sequences, Spielberg cannot avoid falling into the temptation of making an excessively explicit statement of his message. And that's where, maybe, a spectator drops part of the equipment that they have agreed to carry up to that moment. And it is one thing to get involved in the need for a free press that defends the truth against the desperate attempts of those in power to hinder it., and a very different one that they want to sell us that image of knights without swords that they try to build in their argument.. And no spectator who is even remotely aware of the extent to which this work has become, nowadays, in a spectacle not always so noble. It will be at that time, before that final image that we mentioned before, when that feeling of nostalgia assails us when we think about whether that epic war we just witnessed might not be something from that past that, precisely for that, for being passed, it's already happened.
At the antipodes of Spielberg's cinema is the latest production by Argentine director Lucrecia Martel, Exist. Here, where Spielberg clung to the mechanisms of classic cinema, Martel bets on shooting in a completely and radically different direction.
The first thing to consider when facing a job like Exist the thing is, unlike in Spielberg's film, here the argument is not the most relevant. We could almost say that there is no such thing as something that is understood as such.. Yes there are some events, of course, and there are some characters. Recapitulating the information that the film gives us, we could say that Exist tells us the story of Diego de Zama, an official of the Spanish crown stationed in the distant American lands at the end of the 19th century. XVII. Exist, The character, You want to return to Spain and to do so you must have the consent of the king.. But things will not be so easy and he will have to accept that his position in the complex structure of the state is not very favorable for his intentions.. Desperate, will finally embark on a journey to capture a rebellious criminal that will come at a high cost to his life.. This is, we could say, the “plot” that articulates this film. However, as in the rest of Martel's cinema, what is supposed to concern us is not clearly stated. Martel puts the elements, But it will be the viewer who has to extract from each piece those relationships that give the whole its ultimate meaning..
This fragmented structure will come to condition the visual decisions on which the Argentine director supports her formal commitment.. Have, well, a series of sequences starring this character who monopolizes each image, only link between them. Lucrecia Martel rejects, besides, all precious intention in the creation of your images, we could say, even, how poetic. There is no musicality between the sequences and the transition between them is, for that very reason, deliberately crude. The fact that Martel skips any intention of chronology in his film does little to soften this relationship.. There is in Exist, of course, a temporal linearity (a before and after or, rather, as follows), but that relationship does not condition what they are telling us.
And what does it tell us Exist? Lucrecia Martel travels to the past to tell us about some things and, specifically, like in the Spielberg film, of the mechanisms of power. Zama is a state official whose life is conditioned by the whim of His Majesty.. But, as we will understand throughout the film, Diego de Zama is, In fact, an absolute nobody. So, This man trapped in a land that is not his own fights against a system that ignores him and against which, in the end, he understands that he can't do anything. It is not very difficult to make the similarities between the world of this anonymous individual and ours.. Against the prerogatives of power, the common man is left a mere servant without much opportunity to direct his destiny. Zama fight, So, against an invisible wall, but that will mark his tragic destiny. The other issue that Martel brings into play here is the confrontation between that world, apparently more civilized, what the conquerors represent, with the tribal world represented by the inhabitants of these virgin lands. And here we find perhaps some of the most powerful and suggestive scenes of the entire film.. In the middle of the hunt to capture the rebels, The group accompanying Zama is attacked by a group of indigenous people. The scene is brutally moving in its simplicity., elegantly exploiting all the violence that the situation contains. As in so many other moments, there is nothing much to explain here. In the conflagration between these two worlds, its message is well exposed..
However, We could say that where Martel finds his best bets, there are also their weaknesses. It is true that we would be wrong to evaluate his work under the same paradigms of entertainment cinema in which a work like Spielberg's is inscribed., to give an example. Lucrecia Martel does not want or seek to entertain the viewer, at least, in the sense in which we understand that cinema tries to make it more commercial. Martel wants his audience to look carefully and draw their own conclusions and the aesthetic pleasure of what the screen offers them.. But, accepting your bet without hesitation, We cannot escape the fact that, stripped of all intention of constructing a typical story, extracted from the images all poetic approximation, musical, the structure that he proposes to us is, except in some moments, emotionally redundant. and there, before falling into a certain and comfortable drowsiness, one wonders to what extent he is interested in that reflection to which he incites us. GERARDO LEON
