Dalia and the Red Book, an Argentinian Animated Sleeper

They are sort of like animated versions of Pirandello’s six characters in search of an author, but their Argentinian author, Adolfo is gone. They do not really want someone to write their ending for them anyway. They would prefer it if someone would simply take their dictation. That someone would be their author’s daughter, Dalia. However, her favorite character encourages her to write her own story in screenwriter-director David Bisbano’s Dalia and the Red Book, which releases tomorrow on VOD.

Dalia keeps insisting to her mother she does not want to be a writer. However, her mom can recognize talent. After all, she was Adolfo’s editor. Unfortunately, it was not full-time work, because her dad took his sweet time with every short story he released and he never finished what would have been his first novel.

That is where Dalia comes in. When she discovers the notebook in which Adolfo wrote his unfinished narrative, it reawakens the fictional, but very real otherworld. Wolf and her accomplices want an ending, wherein they emerge triumphant. However, Goat arrives just in time to rescue her. He happened to be the character Dalia created, but he has taken on new traits over time, like his aviator goggles.

The now stylish Goat must escort her back to her world before time runs out on Adolfo’s old pocket watch. It would be helpful towards that goal if she could finally write an ending, but Dalia has always struggled to conclude her stories.

It is odd that this film largely flew under the festival radar, because the hybrid 3D/2D/stop-motion animation is impressively immersive and the story celebrates the power of creativity in ways that should resonate with animation fans. There are also several revelations that hold a good deal of psychological and archetypal meaning, so they seem fitting and appropriate in the context of the film.

The Klezmer Project

Probably Brooklyn and Lower Manhattan offer the best bets for finding live klezmer music on any average night. Instead, Leandro sets out looking for it in the Eastern European countries where it originated. That might sound logical, but the Holocaust and subsequent Communist oppression almost entirely decimated the local Jewish population and its culture. Leandro’s underwriters are not too thrilled, but he devotes more energy to impressing Paloma, the Klezmer clarinetist he fell for, in Leandro Koch & Paloma Schachmann’s hybrid documentary, The Klezmer Project, which releases tomorrow wherever you rent movies.

Initially, Koch never really thought much of his Jewish grandmother’s Jewish roots in Bessarabia, until he videotaped a wedding where Paloma’s Argentinean Klezmer band played. To impress her, he hatches a scheme to make a documentary about Klezmer in Romania and Ukraine, coinciding with her own research trip with American ethnomusicologist Bob Cohen. Somehow, his old school acquaintance agrees to produce, securing funding from Austrian public television.

The problem is there is no klezmer to be found, which does not surprise Cohen. He rather expected it. Instead, Cohen shows the Argentineans the lasting influence of klezmer on the local non-Yiddish musical traditions. They find many traditional musicians still playing the old klezmer songs—but they are not klezmer bands.

Cohen is a fascinating lecturer and story-teller, who likens the music they find to decayed fossils that are defined by the negative space they leave behind in rock formations. As it happens, one place where they can still find those traces is Romania’s Iza Valley, where the people “retreated into tradition” as a “defense mechanism” against the Communist regime.

As a parallel narrative, Paloma’s academic friend, Dr. Perla Sneh, narrates the story of Yankel the incompetent grave-digger, who falls in love with the Rabbi’s beautiful daughter, Teibele, but his ignorant attempts to feign Talmudic learning produce disastrous results. Leandro is more than sufficiently self-aware to recognize his similarities with cringy Yankel. Paloma gets it too, but somehow, she starts to feel something like affection for him.

This film will be a challenge to market, but it deserves a chance. The meta-layers will likely confuse viewers and the dearth of legit klezmer might alienate its presumed target audience. However, there is a great deal of appealing Eastern European folk music, from bands that are mostly unheard outside a few miles of their home territories. Yet, their performances are often stirring and soulful.

Deus Irae, on Screambox

When you constantly submerge yourself in evil and corruption, it is bound to leave a mark. Father Javier is an exorcist. He is not merely damaged. He might be damned. So might his entire band of demon vanquishers, but they intend to scare the hell out of Hell in director-screenwriter Pedro Cristiani’s Deus Irae, which premieres today on Screambox.

Father Javier uses heroin to cope. He might have even killed an innocent possessed vessel just to out maneuver a demon. Frankly, it is a little hard to tell what happens in the opening scenes, due to Crisitani’s intentionally fractured style. Regardless, his mentor Ramon fears the once-good Father has lost his way, but that makes him perfect for the demon-busting trio led by Father Marcos.

Together with Sister Helena, they perform the exorcisms other priests just won’t do. If that results in a bit of collateral damage, so be it. In fact, Father Javier starts to figure that might be a good thing, because it shows the Hellspawn their willingness to go to extreme lengths.

Somehow, Deus Irae is extremely disturbing, even when you are not entirely sure what the heck is happening. It is also very gory and annoyingly dark and murky. This film is basically difficult to watch in every conceivable way, yet it is clearly the work of a provocative genre auteur. In fact, it is hard to think of another film that so directly challenges moral assumptions.

Adios Buenos Aires: Last Tangos in Argentina

Never refer to a bandoneon as an accordion. You’d be barred from entering Argentina. The smaller bellows instrument makes every melody sound beautiful and sad. Unfortunately, nothing is sadder than a depression, which had been the reality of the Argentinean economy for three years and counting in late 2001. Julio Farber has had enough, so he is immigrating to Germany with his mother and daughter. However, he has yet to break the bad news to his tango band. Despite the chaos of the Argentinazo riots, saying goodbye is hard to do in German Kral’s Adios Buenos Aires, which is now playing in New York.

Farber and his bandmates love the music, but they live off their day jobs. Their last gig only earned them a dozen empanadas, but since this is Argentina, at least they were probably delicious empanadas. After their latest vocalist quits, they try to recruit the legendary but long-retired Ricardo Tortorella as his replacement. He turns them down unequivocally when they visit his nursing home, but then arrives right on time for their first rehearsal.

Farber is hoping to liquid his assets quickly, including the car a rookie cab driver soon runs off the road, into an embankment. Of course, when Farber tracks down Mariela Martinez through her company, she admits she is uninsured. However, he allows her to pay for the damages in installments, once he recognizes how hard she works for her young deaf son. In the meantime, Martinez agrees to chauffeur Farber and his bandmates to all their gigs, so she soon gets to know them all quite well.

Indeed, meeting the band’s prickly personalities is one of the film’s greatest pleasures. The piano player, Carlos Acosta, is obsessed with numbers in a way that often gives rise to compulsive gambling. Tito Godoy is the bass player and neighborhood mechanic, who has cannibalized more parts from Farber’s wrecked car than he has fixed. Atilio Fernandez is a retired history professor, whose leftist sensibilities are inflamed by the economic crisis, even though it was the Peronistas and their ilk that got the country in its current mess.

Kral has a keen affinity for tango, having previously helmed the documentary, Our Last Tango. However, the film also vividly recreates the anarchy and anxiety of the Argentinazo era. Savvy viewers will be expecting the government’s notoriously draconian limits on bank withdrawals, so every time Farber deposits the proceeds from the sale of his assets, the pit in their stomachs will tighten. Watching the mayhem that plays out in the banks and on the streets helps explain why Argentina just elected Javier Milei, arguably the most libertarian head of state ever. Considering what the Peronistas and their various splinter parties have wrought, who wouldn’t want to try something completely different?

Yet, Kral quite deftly balances the real-life political and economic disorder with the music and the bittersweet romantic comedy. The mutual attraction that blossoms between Martinez and Farber is never driven by cute contrivances. More than anything, their shared experiences as single parents lead to sympathy and understanding.

Every significant role is perfectly cast, starting with the romantic leads, Diego Cremonesi and Marina Bellati, who develop a sweetly shy and believably awkward chemistry together. Mario Alarcon plays the great Tortorella with elegant dignity and poignant sadness. Carlos Portaluppi, Rafael Spregelburd, and Manuel Vicente are colorfully crusty as Farber’s bandmates. They get a lot of laughs kvetching, but there is a good deal of wisdom in their banter. They also look convincing holding their instruments. That is especially true for Cremonesi wiedling the bandoneon.

Legions, from Argentina

As a shamanistic warlock, blood and faith are all that matter to Antonio Poyju. Both are central to his work and his identity. Unfortunately, his demonic nemesis has targeted his daughter Helena’s faith to undermine his bloodline. Poyju was never happy in contemporary urban society, so he is perversely just as comfortable cooling his heels in a criminal asylum, but he will have to finally break out to save his estranged daughter in Fabian Forte’s Legions, which is now available on VOD.

Poyju would prefer to still live as a medicine man-hermit in the rain forest, “mediating” between the spirit realm and our own world. However, a demon killed his beloved wife and stole the talisman that guarded Helena’s faith. As her belief waned, the demon grew stronger. The secular society attracted the teenager like a magnet, so the old man moved with her. However, he still practiced his severe brand of spiritualism, which was misunderstood in the capitol. Ultimately, he was committed to the mental hospital, while his son-in-law, Warren, files his appeal and serves as a buffer for the increasingly freaked out Helena.

Of course, we know she hasn’t seen anything yet. Unfortunately, old Poyju is right about everything. That means his daughter is in grave danger. He needs a lot of spiritual help to save her, but his cronies in the asylum mostly just provide comedic relief.

Weirdly, the inmates are staging a play based on Poyju’s demonic battles, but Forte wisely avoids meta gamesmanship, using it instead as a macabre and absurdist backdrop. Frankly, descriptions positioning Legions as a comedy somewhat overstate matters, but it certainly has an off-kilter sensibility that helps set it apart.

Nocturna “Sides” A & B

What is scarier than death? Living badly, without your full capacities. What is worse than that? Regret for the mistakes that separated you from your loved ones. At least that is what the experiences of an aging Argentinian man would suggest. He will confront all these grim realities and possibly also the supernatural (or perhaps not) during what could be his last night on Earth in Gonzalo Calzada’s Nocturna: Side A—The Great Old Man’s Night and its more experimental companion film, Nocturna: Side B—Where the Elephants Go to Die, both of which release tomorrow as a “double bill” on VOD.

Nocturna is sort of like the horror version of Haneke’s Amour. In fact, scenes of the confused Ulises lost in the halls of his once grand apartment building summon memories of Jean-Louis Trintignant in a similar position. However, Ulises’ marriage to Dalia is not as loving as the one portrayed by Trintignant and Emmanuelle Riva. For one thing, viewers are clearly invited to question whether she is even still alive. Regardless, we learn from flashbacks Dalia bullied Ulises when they were children and there is reason to believe the dynamic continued throughout their union.

Sadly, Ulises’ strained relationships with his grown children is a profound disappointment for him. Most of his human interaction is with the reasonably patient but not especially warm building super. However, he also once knew the upstairs neighbor Elena, who is apparently now dead and haunting the old couple by pounding on their door each night. Eventually, we will figure out what happened to everyone when Ulises finally starts piecing together his fragments of shattered memory.

Side A (107 minutes) is a surprisingly ambitious, yet fundamentally humanist take on horror, aging, and the horror of aging that is radically different from Calzada’s last US-distributed film, Luciferina. Arguably, the companion Side B (a mere 67 minutes) is even more ambitious, representing a sort of Guy Maddin-esque reverie, presenting the events of Side A through ghostly streams-of-consciousness. Side A stands alone and it is exponentially more accessible, so most of this review will focus on it. There is an audience for Side B’s distorted analog aesthetic, but casual viewers would need Side A to understand the context of each scene.

Pepe Soriano plays Ulises in both films and it is a relentlessly honest and cathartic performance (especially in Side A). The 92-year-old veteran thesp is obviously credible as the physically and mentally declining Ulises, but the guilt and remorse he projects from the screen is almost overwhelming. He is also convincingly frightened to his bones.

The Onetti Brothers’ What the Waters Left Behind

The devastation of Epecuen was even worse than the hardest hit wards during Hurricane Katrina. The former tourist city on Argentina’s coast was wiped out and it is never coming back. Of course, that makes it an intriguing shooting location for an irresponsible film crew. Their documentary is doomed and so are they in the Onetti Brothers’ What the Waters Left Behind, which releases today on DVD.

Vasco, his hired crew, and his faithless girlfriend Vicky are driving to Epecuen to make a documentary. Their star will be Carla, who is revisiting the site of the disaster she barely survived as a child. However, they should have turned right around when they got an eyeful of the rustic yokels at the last-chance gas station—and their sketchy Sweeney Todd-esque meat pies—but they don’t.

Naturally, the Texas Chainsaw-style freaks proceed to kill them off in brutal fashion. There is one outsider added to the mix: “Senor X,” who is looking for a missing loved on, but he doesn’t amount to much. There is maybe one surprise in store for horror fans, but The Waters still has little to offer that is new and absolutely nothing that is pleasant to watch.

The Onetti Brothers’ foray into the slasher sub-genre really only has three things going for it: location, location, and location. The Epecuen backdrops are truly haunting. They are also arguably exploitative. This is the scene of a massive tragedy, so the film’s depiction of knuckle-dragging survivors is really quite questionable.