Jon (![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} jbmurray) wrote,@ 2004-08-08 12:21:00 |
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A friend just wrote to me via email: "I see you haven't blogged since your traumatic consulate experience. Did they ever let you in?" So, to dispel any rumours that I might be languishing in some US prison camp... Yup, they let me in, and in fact I've been adding a fair few new stamps to the passport since June. Am currently in Lima, following a couple of weeks in Santiago and Buenos Aires.
Mostly I've been seeing people and so on, but along the way one point of such trips is to buy books and videos etc. Last night I watched a couple of the DVDs that I'd picked up in Argentina, and they included one of the worst films I've seen in a long time, plus one of the best.
So here's my pick: Don't ever bother going to see Herencia, should the possibility arise, but do make haste to see Abrazo Partido.
The latter really is an excellent film: shot in a shopping mall (well, more a crappy old little shopping arcade) in suburban Buenos Aires, it's about both the motley multiethnic community in the arcade (from Korean to Italian to Jewish to...) and focusses on the son of the lingerie shop owner and his family. In some ways its a fairly simple Oedipal drama (the absent father returns to face the son's rage) but I liked the portrayal of the community, and in any case the dialogue was characteristically witty and sharp. We're in the shifting sands of the neoliberal market, where nothing, and particularly no value, is exactly fixed or sure. So, for instance, the movie's set piece is a race that's the climax of a difference of opinion between two merchants, as to whether the debt that one owes the other should be in pesos or dollars. Precisely the question as to whether debts (or savings) should be calculated by the old exchange rate (one to one) or the new rate (one to three or four) was at the centre of the Argentine political crisis in 2001 and 2002. But here the dispute is resvolved by proxy: two of the merchants' employees, one of whom is known simply as "the Peruvian," are to race with their carts in a downtown Buenos Aires street, the whole event adjudicated by the local rabbi. The race winner's employer gets to decide the currency of the debt. And of course the whole arcade turns out to watch the action.
A friend just wrote to me via email: "I see you haven't blogged since your traumatic consulate experience. Did they ever let you in?" So, to dispel any rumours that I might be languishing in some US prison camp... Yup, they let me in, and in fact I've been adding a fair few new stamps to the passport since June. Am currently in Lima, following a couple of weeks in Santiago and Buenos Aires.
Mostly I've been seeing people and so on, but along the way one point of such trips is to buy books and videos etc. Last night I watched a couple of the DVDs that I'd picked up in Argentina, and they included one of the worst films I've seen in a long time, plus one of the best.
So here's my pick: Don't ever bother going to see Herencia, should the possibility arise, but do make haste to see Abrazo Partido.
The latter really is an excellent film: shot in a shopping mall (well, more a crappy old little shopping arcade) in suburban Buenos Aires, it's about both the motley multiethnic community in the arcade (from Korean to Italian to Jewish to...) and focusses on the son of the lingerie shop owner and his family. In some ways its a fairly simple Oedipal drama (the absent father returns to face the son's rage) but I liked the portrayal of the community, and in any case the dialogue was characteristically witty and sharp. We're in the shifting sands of the neoliberal market, where nothing, and particularly no value, is exactly fixed or sure. So, for instance, the movie's set piece is a race that's the climax of a difference of opinion between two merchants, as to whether the debt that one owes the other should be in pesos or dollars. Precisely the question as to whether debts (or savings) should be calculated by the old exchange rate (one to one) or the new rate (one to three or four) was at the centre of the Argentine political crisis in 2001 and 2002. But here the dispute is resvolved by proxy: two of the merchants' employees, one of whom is known simply as "the Peruvian," are to race with their carts in a downtown Buenos Aires street, the whole event adjudicated by the local rabbi. The race winner's employer gets to decide the currency of the debt. And of course the whole arcade turns out to watch the action.
