Lost Embrace

Set in a Buenos Aires galería (shopping mall), this superb, minor-chord comedy places lingerie clerk Ariel (the sweet and doleful Daniel Hendler from ‘Whisky’) at the rueful centre of a group of garrulous, mainly Jewish, fellow shopkeepers, family and mild idiosyncrats as he receives a series of revelations about the father he never knew. Shot like ‘The Office’ on a mobile, hand-held camera which zooms in and out to catch background events and character reactions, Burman’s affectionate, talkative film trades on acceptable levels of sentimentality and boasts a series of winning performances, notably Hendler’s and Adriana Aizemberg’s as his evasive mother. Reminiscent at times of Chantal Ackerman’s mall-set musical ‘Golden Eighties’ or Joan Micklin Silver’s bitter-sweet Jewish homage ‘Crossing Delancey’, ‘Lost Embrace’ sets a drolly comic tone all of its own. Small and light, but it’s rewardingly full of acute observations, from the gently satiric to the surprisingly poignant.