Film

Whisky (2004)

Director: Juan Pablo Rebella, Pablo Stoll

Movie review

From Time Out London

Reviewing ‘25 Watts’, the first film by Pablo Stoll and Juan Pablo Rebella, Time Out’s Tom Charity listed Richard Linklater, Kevin Smith and early Jim Jarmusch as reference points. For the Uruguayan duo’s prize-winning second feature, Jarmusch remains relevant, but the movie is far more taciturn, elliptical, melancholy and – in its own deliciously subtle way – warm-hearted than anything by Linklater, let alone Smith. What we have here (though it’s not due to that title) is a Latin American equivalent to recent films by Aki Kaurismäki. Sixty-year-old Jacobo Köller (Andrés Pazos) owns a none too successful sock factory; till a year ago, he lived with and looked after his mother, which seems to have left him morose and devoted to routine. But now his brother Herman (Jorge Bollani), who lives with his wife in Brazil and missed mom’s funeral, plans to visit for the erection of a headstone, so Jacobo – for reasons kept to himself – asks his forewoman Marta (Mirella Pascual) to pretend to be his wife for the duration of Herman’s stay… It should be said that some of the above is deduced by yours truly rather than made explicit in the narrative; dialogue is sparse, especially in the film’s first half, and one of the movie’s pleasures stems from actively engaging with what’s shown in order to make sense of motives, cause and effect, nuance and resonance. Like this audacious, improbably expressive take on characterisation and narrative, the bone-dry comedy is as reticent as the trio portrayed. Everything’s beautifully understated; we’re allowed time to take in and reflect on what’s happening; and, notwithstanding the pervasive wry humour, the threesome are themselves treated with respect. This last virtue derives as much from the use of an un-prying, utterly static camera as from the excellent, entirely unsentimental performances. Lovely stuff.

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