The director of this movie was also the director of The Full Monty, and if you are looking for something similar, you will be disappointed--but if you are looking for a quiet indie film that has some really awful things going on in hte background but that does not deal with that ugliness head on, you might enjoy this--I did.
The movie features a mentally checked-out teacher named Michell at a boys’ private school in Buenos Aires, Argentina--we do not find out until much later what it was that happened to him that left him so damaged, but it is there.
It all starts to shift a bit for him when he finds a Magellanic penguin on the beach in Uruguay, cleans him up, and the penguin is quite imprinted on him, and he reluctantly brings it home with him. The penguin helps him to segue back into the land of empathy and compassion, a place he has been disconnected from for an untold amount of time.
Unfortunately, he is working in Argentina in the time when a right-wing military dictatorship takes over the country and is kidnapping people on the street and disappearing them. Sounds impossible but that is also happening right now in the United States, so never forget. This does not dealve too deeply into those waters, but does end with the sobering statistics on how widespread the kidnapping, torture and murder was and how many people suffered. I was in Buenos Aires earlier this year, and there are many doorsteps throughout the city marking homes where people disappeared and who they were--never foget.
No comments:
Post a Comment