Buenos Aires Vice Versa

Agresti returned home from Europe to film this colourful, deceptively casual kaleidoscopic look at life in contemporary Buenos Aires: a city, as the various fragmented stories show, where the past - particularly in the form of absent (i.e. 'disappeared') families - exerts a strong, even tragic influence on the present. If that sounds heavy and obvious, the film has the same steadily intoxicating blend of passion and wit, romance and melancholy, meditation and vitality as the Astor Piazzolla tangos argued over in one café scene. And the characters, from a young woman hired to shoot a video of city life by a reclusive old couple, to a shunned woman who bellows at her ex when he's on the TV, and a kid who lives on the streets, are as engaging and easy to watch as the relaxed but vibrant camerawork.