El lado oscuro del corazón
Argentina,
1992, 126 min
Shown in 1993
CREDITS
- dir
-
Eliseo Subiela
- prod
-
Roger Frappier, Eliseo Subiela
- scr
-
Eliseo Subiela
- cam
-
Hugo Colace
- editor
-
Marcela Saenz
- cast
-
Darío Grandinetti, Sandra Ballesteros, Nacha Guevara, Jean-Pierre Reguerraz, André Melançon
- source
-
Max Films
-
COMMENTS
Eliseo Subiela, Sandra Ballesteros and Darío Grandinetti in person.
OTHER
An enormously popular film in Argentina, Dark Side of the Heart has been credited with increasing the sales of poetry books in Buenos Aires and influencing young men to communicate with their girlfriends exclusively through poems. It is the story of Oliverio, who leads a double life: as an advertising man and as a misunderstood and unpublished poet. He speaks to women through poems about his search for "a woman who knows how to fly." From this premise, which opens the film with one of the most startling and controversial scenes in contemporary Argentine cinema, Subiela constructs a film that fuses reality and imagination. On the one hand, it shows everyday life, friends, a butcher's wedding. On the other, it has Oliverio meet a mysterious woman in black (Death), and presents a surreal monologue between him and a cow that he mistakes for his dead mother. As in previous films that were equally rich and daring (Man Facing Southeast, SFIFF 1987; Last Images of the Shipwreck, SFIFF 1990) Subelia is not afraid to be ambiguous, or (especially here) delve in to melodrama. When Oliverio falls in love with Ana the prostitute, he offers her his bleeding heart and they dance to the music of a lush bolero. They run away together,and the film begins to look like an enactment of the lyrics of a South American tango. This is one more cinematic strategy that leads to the characters' role reversal, allowing Oliverio to illuminate the "dark side" of his heart, which caused so many conflicts in his relationship with women.
—Jorge Ruffinelli
FACTOID #85
In 1996, Harvey Keitel was the first recipient of the Peter J. Owens Award, honoring “brilliance, independence and honesty” in acting. Honest he was. During the clip show at his tribute Keitel, unhappy with one of the clips, began waving his arms and shouting until the screen went black. The screen lit up with a new clip and the tribute continued.
