Twin tales of fun and loss
The universe is all about balance, and sometimes so are movie theaters. For every dark, nihilistic drama there is an equally light confection with which to cleanse the palate. That balance can also serve the mood of the zeitgeist, and if ever there was a mood, it’s now.
For those who would prefer to wallow in bleak misery, writer, director and co-star Casey Affleck’s first solo feature film, Light of My Life, should do the trick. Set in an undefined post-pandemic (!) future, where a plague has decimated the female population, a man (Affleck) travels the dystopian roads with his 11-year-old daughter Rag (Anna Pniowsky). Sounds simple enough, but in order to protect her, he must disguise her as a boy.
That makes Light sound like a mash-up of The Road and Children of Men, but in its defense there’s more to it than that. Affleck’s film is also about loss — of a wife, family and society — devotion, feminine maturity and the inherent dangers that come with it.
The images are bathed in natural light that makes the lurking dangers as well as the father’s anxiety palpable as well as gracefully heightening the tension. The slow-burn narrative allows Rag’s growing wisdom and curiosity to feel like a time-bomb waiting to go off, and when violence inevitably erupts in the third act, we fully expect it. Affleck is a sensitive, observational filmmaker, keyed into emotion rather than action (the film could be 20 minutes shorter), and that works in painting Rag and her father’s complex, but loving, relationship. Ironically, the degree to which viewers will fall under Affleck’s feminine empowerment spell will correlate to how easily they can separate art from artist: he was entangled in sexual harassment litigation in 2010.
On the brighter side is Argentinian director Juan José Campanella’s first film since
The Secret in Their Eyes’s 2009 Oscar win. Mixing cinema itself with the most modern of heists, The Weasels’ Tale is a gloriously acid-tongued romp pitting fading movie star Mara Ordaz (the legendary Graciela Borges) and her posse against an ambitious young couple from the city that would exploit her vanity to essentially steal her sprawling house. Shedding the Dirty Warsera political bite of his awardwinner (it won 50 others besides that Oscar) for intergenerational comedy, Campanella proves he hasn’t lost his storytelling touch in the intervening decade. He gets an assist from production designer Nelson Noel Luty working his dream job — Mara’s house is a museum unto itself — and stellar performances from Mara’s men, which buoy many of the film’s more outlandish elements. As her suspicious director Norberto (Oscar Martínez), caustic screenwriter Martín (Marcos Mundstock), and hopelessly un-artistic husband Pedro (Luis Brandon) conspire to outwit their millennial rivals, Bárbara (Clara Lago) and Francisco (Nicolás Francella), the snappy dialogue eventually leads to unearthing the requisite skeletons in the closet and an overly clever endgame. But by the time that rolls around most viewers will be so enamored of Mara and her witty roommates it won’t matter.