Shipwrecks – 6 points
(Uruguay/Argentina, 2023)
Address: Vanina Spataro.
Script: Vanina Spataro and Daniel García Molt.
Duration: 90 minutes.
Performers: Alfonso Tort, Sofia Palomino, Maiamar Abrodos, Lautaro Bettoni, Mateo Chiarino.
Premiering exclusively at Cine Gaumont and INCAA Spaces.
The visit to a off-season spa, that classic of cinema from the region, on both banks of the Río de la Plata. In Shipwrecks, debut film by Argentinian Vanina Spataro filmed in co-production across the pond, the one who gets off the bus and heads to a little house near the sea in the middle of the autumn season is Maite, a Sofia Palomino who competes in sullenness and caraculism with the character played in Emily (2020), the film of César Sodero which found the actress in the role of a young woman returning to the Patagonian land. Unlike that more mysterious cinematic creature, Maite has a compelling reason to escape Buenos Aires and settle for a few weeks on that unnamed beach (filming was carried out in La Pedrera and La Paloma): a love disappointment that she has a bad temper, as demonstrated by the few telephone communications with this apparent ex.
In the place Only four other people seem to live: a solitary man who spends his days painting pictures in front of the sea (the Uruguayan Alfonso Tort), a doctor and occasional tarot reader (Maiamar Abrodos), a young Argentinian bather who spent a summer there and ended up staying forever, and a woman who cleans houses while taking care of her sick husband. As if it were a particular assembled family, the quintet draws the silhouette of a human map pushed to the interaction by chance and causality: a power outage, a strong wind that closes the front door, even death. The essential point of view seems to be that of Maite, but Spataro gives eyes to all the characters; They, as is often stated, are somewhat right for being the way they are and not otherwise. There are bits of humor in Shipwrecksbut it is not a comedy: the prevailing tone is that of a melancholic naturalism.
The film’s biggest challenge involves sustaining a dramatic structure that works around the personal trauma, No matter how minor it may seem: each being faces a fact from the present or the past, torn between desire and possibilities. Sex is a powerful driving force, as some words suggest and facts demonstrate, but in the end the friction and collision of bodies is nothing more than a physical manifestation of the deepest longings.
The greatest enemy of Shipwrecks is the over-explicitness, that takes over the plot when a castaway, an enigmatic and apparently amnesiac man who appears on the beach during a stormy night, interrupts the development of a small birthday party and twists the course of life of one of the main characters. At a certain moment, the question haunts Maite: stay or return? And so, while the closing titles climb across the screen after the ending, all the lights go out: the morning sun touching the sand and the sea and the night light, simulated by pure lantern with a blue filter.
