Los guantes mágicos
Argentina,
2003, 90 min
Shown in 2004
CREDITS
- dir
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Martín Rejtman
- prod
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Hernán Musaluppi, Martín Rejtman
- scr
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Martín Rejtman
- cam
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José Luis García
- editor
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Rosario Suárez
- mus
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Diego Vanier, Gabriel Fernández Capello
- cast
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Gabriel Fernández Capello, Valeria Bertuccelli, Fabián Arenillas, Susana Pampín
- source
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WORLD SALES Bavaria Film International, Bavariafilmplatz 8, D-82031 Geiselgasteig, Germany. FAX: 49-89-64-99-37-20. EMAIL: bavaria.international@bavaria-film.de.
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COMMENTS
Martín Rejtman in person.
OTHER
This most deadpan of deadpan comedies about an economically bankrupt and spiritually impoverished contemporary Argentine middle class is director Martín Rejtman’s third feature film. As with Eric Rohmer and Nanni Moretti’s characters (and more acidly, Luis Buñuel’s), Rejtman’s are comically adrift. Their individual and collective circumstances would be too grim without the salvaging touches of absurdity and comic moments. Each character is immersed in life’s everyday struggle—love, work, achievement and, most elusive of all, happiness. Alejandro is a car service driver who loops endlessly between the Ezeiza airport and Buenos Aires. His acquaintances consist of individuals with aspirations to be a rock musician, a noted actor, an international flight attendant. Instead, as amateurs, they remain marginalized in a microcosm of decadence and get-rich-quick schemes. Rejtman’s powers of observation are those of a cultural anthropologist, approaching Jarmusch and Kaurismäki in his cool eye for the droll and irrational. His dry wit gives his characters a monochromatic quality and their ennui becomes ours. Like Godot, the characters are waiting for external forces to change their lives: Israeli tech stocks, a trip to a Brazilian spa, moving to Canada or the arrival of the eponymous “magic gloves.”
—Cathleen Rountree
FACTOID #27
A surrealist stop-motion animator, the Czech Jan Svankmajer, was the first recipient of the Golden Gate Persistence of Vision Award in 1997. The POV Award honors the lifetime achievement of a filmmaker who works outside of feature-length narrative filmmaking.
