Dir. Carlos Sorin, Argentina/Spain 2004; 97mins.
A slight but charming film by Carlos Sorin, in which a middle-aged, newly-unemployed mechanic is given a showdog, finds a new life and perks up a bit. It's much like his earlier Historias Mínimas: a sort of road movie, though slimmer in plot, also filmed in Patagonia and using (entirely?) non-actors, who with one or two exceptions are exceptional. Historias Mínimas has a touch of the overblown western, with flights of absurdity that jar with the baseline of the film, but this is much more grounded, and better for it. In the making-of that came with my dvd he gives his practical tips for working with 'real people':
He'll shoot maybe 20 different takes for a scene, and the raw material is largely disappointing, but there will be moments of truth when they're not pretending, when it's real. The ratios are big, 40:1 or 50:1. You can't have people playing characters too far from themselves, but the character development comes in the editing. There's no script, the dialogue arises from the situation, and he's more interested in motivation. They shoot in narrative order, and geographically correctly: if they have to drive a thousand miles for a scene and then five hundred back again for the next, that's what they do, and they do reshoots immediately.
The light is great (though not in this clip); and the dogo is particularly good, of course. Evidently Coco, the lead, was Sorin's car-parker. For a man with few facial expressions, he's fully expressive. I like.
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