The ghost of the Rampante family – 6 points
(Argentina, 2023)
Address: Leandro Tolchinsky.
Duration: 74 minutes.
Premiering exclusively at Cine Gaumont.
From a point of view perhaps too much materialisticthe directorial debut of editor Leandro Tolchinsky narrates the story of a failure. From another perspective, the The ghost of the Rampante family is the story of a evolution, a maturation. The documentary project itself could have ended in nothing, as stated by the director in the notes of intention delivered to the press: “It is a film that I started in 2011, having recently graduated from film school. The start of filming was very makeshift and I wasn’t sure what it was going to be about. “I recorded again in 2013 and 2015, but without certainty about what I was going to do with that material.”
By all accounts, yes, The ghost of the Rampant family has an irrefutable intention: record the steps of the variety group El Escuadrón Volante, whose plays bathed in absurd humor Bad children and The tragedy of the Rampante familymarked by a self-managed production process and the most absolute artistic independence, They had a stint in various underground spaces several decades ago.
The archival images of those settings, recorded with low-definition video cameras, contrast with those recorded by Tolchinsky a little more than a decade ago. They also differentiate the folly explored on the stage, including a green plush elephant, with the conversations of the members of the collective and an element that until then was foreign to the cell: a professional theater director. The film starts from a present in which the members of the squad decide, for the first time in their history, to have a figure of power under the stage, although without completely giving up the freedom with which they usually work.
The chosen project is a very unfaithful adaptation of the famous work by Alfred Jarry Ubu King. Placed ubiquitously, as if it were a fly on the wall, The camera follows the conversations and discussions of each other, returning to the past and returning to the present to think about the future.
There appears the “ghost” of the title, that of the Rampante family, following the definition of the playwright and director Alejandro Schiappacasse. That is, the burden of a way of understanding the dynamics of the group, a concept that one wants to leave behind but insists on. go back hard. At a certain point, after many months of rehearsals and writing, the creative frictions and clashes have a point of no return, and the film will follow the further development of the work – finally executed outside the scope of the Squadron – and that of the group of actors, crossed by the transition from the stage to the audiovisual medium. Tolchinsky’s is a documentary that is of special interest to those viewers interested in the adventures of the local independent theater, but also – its universal mark – in the pleasures and pains of the creative process.
