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Play (2005)

Director: Alicia Scherson

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Movie review

From Time Out London

Scherson’s debut as writer-director is a gently-paced romantic drama, a spiritual sister to ‘Wings of Desire’, tightly scripted but with a nice meandering feel. Christina (the excellent Viviana Herrera) is the friendless Mapucha country girl who has come to Santiago to nurse an elderly Hungarian; Tristán (the divertingly downcast Andrés Ulloa) is the romantically-rejected middle-class architect who becomes the object of her fascination after she finds his stolen briefcase in her refuse. If Scherson shows a precocious ability to echo Wenders’ tone of grave whimsicality, suggesting a synchronicity of souls through cross-cutting and dove-tailing separate destinies, she also makes a sweetly individual appropriation of the ‘magical-realist’ conventions of Latin-American cinema, grounding her fantasy elements (a leather-clad angelic intervention, Christina kick-boxing a ‘bad mother’) in the iconography of the game arcade where Christina passes her lonely afternoons. Add a clever use of sound and Ricardo de Angelis’s thoughtfully shot cityscapes to the credible performances and you have, finally, a winning and sensitive take on modern metropolitan life across the class divide.

Author: Wally Hammond

Time Out London Issue 1900: January 17-24 2007

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