HOME’s Viva festival is in its 25th year and judging by the packed house at 6:15 on a Monday evening, it is going to be running for many years to come. The Festival has a theme of ‘Serious Fun’ this year, but receiving less emphasis in their marketing the festival also focuses on a particular country each year, and in 2019 it is Argentina that receives Viva’s attention. With some notable plaudits and quite a fanfare comes ‘Rojo’, the third feature from Benjamin Naishtat.
The screening was preceded by an introduction by Dr Carmen Herrero, which was thorough to the point of excess, with in-depth references to a range of films that perhaps didn’t add to our enjoyment of the one we were about to see. However, when Dr Herrero was being direct the material was insightful and helped us to appreciate the complex social context in which the film was set. She was also detailed about the filmmaking influences which inspired Naishtat’s style, which garnered awards for Best Director & Cinematography at the San Sebastian Film Festival.
Rojo is set in 1975, when Argentina is on the brink of a military coup and the country is bristling with paranoid tension. Local government officials are insidious puppets to an increasingly militarist state, people are disappearing overnight (some in self-imposed exile, some in more sinister circumstances) leaving houses abandoned and unions are being watched carefully. The protagonist, a local union lawyer with all the trappings of middle-class comfort becomes embroiled in a tense and frankly bizarre conflict in a restaurant, which results in a truly shocking opening scene. Set three months after the events of the evening we see Claudio, played excellently by Dario Grandinetti, going about his everyday life as though the events of that night are forgotten. However, the arrival of a private detective puts Claudio under mounting pressure that spills out into his family life.
On a technical level Rojo is a strange film. It is so desperate to reference the 1970s movies that are central to the era in which it is set, as well as clear influences on Naishtat’s filmmaking, that it risks using style over substance. The cinematography, shot on digital but made to look like aged celluloid print of 70s cinema, is really evocative and stylish, but the graining of the stock adds little to the meaning. Lengthy sequences of slow motion and some jarring freeze frames have no discernible purpose other than to be referential, and indeed, reverential. The opening scene uses a ‘split-diopter’ (of course I Googled it!) which is a lens that creates the illusion of shallow depth of field. Whilst watching the scene I found it madly distracting that the shallow focus looked artificial, with blurred lines almost ghosting parts of the frame. The use of shallow focus was relevant to the moment, but why not just use shallow focus, rather than this niche, conspicuous lens? Other stylistic affectations came in the form of the soundtrack, which crackled as though it was printed on vinyl.
Naishtat is not just guilty of smothering his film with unnecessary 1970s homages, nay ‘tics’, but he is also burdening his film with too many ideas. Rojo is a narrative mess, with loose ends hanging frayed in all directions; whole storylines are introduced (some pivotal in the life of characters) only to be discarded without any acknowledgement that they were ever there. One character, having manipulated the protagonist into a moral/legal quagmire, as well as being intrinsically linked to the jeopardy of the opening scene, finds himself excised from the plot as though his footage was accidentally deleted in the edit. Claudio’s wife never once enquires about the how a violent incident that affected them both has been resolved… and I do not mean that she bears the weight of an unspoken secret, but that she blithely inquires of her husband “something is bothering you?” like an oblivious amnesiac. Claudio’s daughter and her friends have a really interesting subplot, which echoes the era’s growing menace from authoritarianism, but like many of the citizens of Argentina in 1975/76, this too just disappears.
There is one outstanding sequence featuring a solar eclipse, in which cinematographer Pedro Sodero uses red hues, the shadow of the moon and bright white light to comment on the conflict between political ideologies coursing through Argentina’s veins. But the emphasis placed on this moment, particularly by the characters who all stop to watch this celestial event, would suggest that the eclipse is working as a catalyst for change (either in character or narrative impetus) and yet the film carries on with no apparent shifts in behaviour, story or pace. Here Naishtat is commenting on how 1975 Argentina was being eclipsed by the upcoming coup, and how the citizens’ ignorance made them complicit in the horrors to come. However, this again felt like style over substance, in which stylistic emphasis is place upon moments, characters, settings or objects, that had little narrative relevance.
Rojo really takes off just before the third act, when the detective, played with imposing restraint by Alfredo Castro, whose intrusive presence unnerves not only Claudio, but the audience as well. His investigation gives the film the narrative focus which it has been striving for, without losing the political subtext. Each scene Castro appears in is rife with tension, as his glacial movements somehow manage to invade his quarry’s space at every turn (the comparisons to Columbo are deliberate and duly noted by most other reviews). The acting in this film is note-perfect, but Castro holds your gaze with vampiric allure.
One gets the feeling that Rojo is Benjamin Naishtat’s real passion project and that it has suffered under the weight of its ideas. It is so bloated with stylistic excess and so reverential to its complicated socio-political context that it never succeeds in either providing clarity on its ideological stance, nor in a satisfying film experience. Yet despite these concerns, I would be lying if I did not say that the tension is gripping when Castro and Grandinetti spar, or that Rojo has standout performances from top to bottom. Naishtat has rightly been recognised as a director to watch, but I hope that his future films have more narrative focus and less split-dioptic focus.
Reviewer - Ben Hassouna-Smith
on - 8/4/19
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