Film reviews: Mysterious plagues, low-key surrealism, and a Mexican election race at Vancouver Latin American Film Festival
Argentinian Ana Katz’s must-see The Dog Who Wouldn’t Be Quiet, an unflappable candidate in The Spokeswoman, and the Uruguayan brain food Window Boy Would Also Like to Have a Submarine
The Dog Who Wouldn’t Be Quiet
The Spokeswoman
Window Boy Would Also Like to Have a Submarine
The Vancouver Latin American Film Festival streams online from August 26 to September 5. The Spokeswoman also screens live at The Cinematheque on September 1 at 6:30 pm; Window Boy Would Also Like to Have a Submarine and The Dog Who Wouldn’t Be Quiet screen September 2 at 6:30 and 8:30 pm respectively.
A MYSTERIOUS PLAGUE infects the globe. People collapse where they stand. They wake, rise to their feet, and collapse again. Soon enough they learn that the air is infected, but only above four feet. So they adapt. Now everyone crawls. If they can’t crawl, a plastic “bubble” worn like a space helmet offers protection from the invisible poison circulating above.
This is perhaps the most surprising and certainly the most poignant development in Ana Katz’s gently absurdist feature The Dog Who Wouldn’t Be Quiet, which arrives as part of the Director’s Spotlight at this year’s Vancouver Latin American Film Festival. The dog of the title might be Rita—a truly splendid little mongrel, a star—or it might be her human partner Sebastian (Daniel Katz), no less likable. For the most part, Sebastian’s defining feature is his passivity. Same with Rita. Maybe Sebastian is Rita? When the B&W film begins, Sebastian is trying to accommodate neighbours upset by Rita’s barking—although we, significantly, barely hear a peep from her, and very little from him. His devotion to the mutt eventually costs Sebastian his home and his job, although, in either case, his aggressors, assuming a superficial air of civility, appear to be inflicting on Sebastian a consensus reality that we the viewer cannot see.
There’s more to say about that later—Argentine filmmaker Katz has produced a deceptively barbed movie, but then again, one of the constant pleasures of the Vancouver Latin American Film Festival, now in its 19th year, is its casual contrast, if one chooses to see it this way, with the culture-bound stuffiness of life in the Great White North. There’s a bracing unruliness to much of the product tapped by programmer Christian Sida-Valenzuela, although one of this year’s most anticipated titles, The Spokeswoman, situated in the politically-inclined Activismo! series, takes a very formal approach to its subject. In 2018, María de Jesús “Marichuy” Patricio Martínez was the first Indigenous woman to make an independent run at Mexico’s presidency, and Luciana Kaplan’s film presents a no-frills account of her journey from the National Indigenous Congress to the race for higher office.
It’s no spoiler that Marichuy’s campaign failed to raise the signatures required to make the ballot; what matters are details collected along the way, not least of them being clear evidence of election fraud, proof of a system adjusting to allow space only for its preferred opposition. It’s no coincidence that Marichuy’s campaign united over 50 distinct Indigenous communities under a single figure, or that these communities face state-sanctioned violence and unique threats from corporate projects including the Mayan Railway, the spread of GMO crops, and fracking. Sound familiar? Marichuy must be an especially galling entity to the establishment and its media stooges. When she shows up in the newsroom, she remains humble but unflappable while her interrogators appear supercilious, vain, and empty. She easily outruns their pointless and melodramatic questions about identity politics.
In the annual New Directors competition, Uruguay’s Window Boy Would Also Like to Have a Submarine has fun pitting a dry aesthetic rigour against its mindbending premise. In the Philippine countryside, a concrete hut mysteriously appears and must be guarded by superstitious locals. On a cruise ship off the coast of Patagonia, a bored worker discovers a door below deck that opens into an apartment in Montevideo. How these things are linked becomes clear, sort of, in an explosive finale. For fans of the fantastique, it’s all very satisfying as brain food and it welcomes all sorts of interpretation, while director Alex Piperno makes choices that would probably elude a Canadian filmmaker. For instance: the apartment in Montevideo has, naturally, an occupant; a woman, who responds to the appearance of a shy deckhand on her balcony with some fear, but mostly with curiosity, which then graduates into friendship.
With its low-key surrealism, Window Boy is a nice companion piece to Ana Katz’s unquiet Dog, which really is the must-see—especially given its distinctly contemporary buzz and a subversive impulse that crystallizes in its final section, when the world within the film is gripped by plague. Again: sound familiar? Our Candide-like hero Sebastian is now a new father, the stakes are higher, and he is forced to reckon with dubious “protocols” that challenge common sense. At long last, he takes an unfussy but courageous stand against groupthink. The Dog Who Wouldn’t Be Quiet was made piecemeal by Katz over six years and finished prior to the pandemic, so her clairvoyance is astounding. More impressive still—and immeasurably important right now—is the film’s natural resistance to moral panic..
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