'Little Flower': Killing a jerk is never easy

2022-12-09T11:03:04.452Z

The new film from the director of 'Argentina, 1985' is a small-looking piece that aims to reach reflections of height

Santiago Mitre, one of the winners of the year with

Argentina, 1985,

political cinema for the people, with almost Hollywood and didactic strategies and a reminder for the new generations of the excesses of the dictatorships, has not been satisfied with a film for the history of the cinema of his country (perhaps more for its social significance than for its intrinsic quality).

This same 2022 has also been picked up with a hilarious, surprising and lewd black comedy.

Little flower,

also co-written with Mariano Llinás, based on a renowned novel by Ioisi Havilio, an existential delusion about routine as the main secret to happiness, demonstrates the generic and thematic versatility of a director who, until now, had circulated along the of political cinema, with works such as

The student, Paulina and La cordillera.

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'Argentina, 1985', a national debate between fiction and memory

Co-production between Argentina, France, Belgium and Spain (which contributes Sergi López as a supporting actor), shot in the French country, in any ugly provincial city,

Little Flower

is a small-looking piece that, based on a bizarre very well curdled, aims to achieve high reflections.

A mess without logic, as it is said verbatim in a dialogue within the film itself, about predictability as reassuring: what is expected is always welcome;

changes, on the contrary, can lead to unhappiness, to restlessness.

The story begins as a costumbrist comedy of a couple with a newborn baby.

Nothing that stands out, stimulates or disappoints, except for one detail: a voice

-over

of the narrator, who addresses the viewer directly talking about you, and who has announced from the first moment that it belongs to a man who is going to be killed by him. protagonist.

And behold, despite everything, the great surprise of the 25th minute of footage.

The comedy of manners turns black.

In an act of impulsive transcendence, the father of the offspring, an indolent person who puts up with them all with a naive face, gets fed up with the stupidity that stalks him and becomes a serial killer of the same person.

And again.

Yes, the sentence does not make sense.

Neither does the film, but therein lies its uniqueness, and even its grace.

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The routine, any routine, even killing someone every week, always the same type, is it the perfect ingredient to achieve happiness or, instead, the lurking fear that grips us and does not allow us to move forward?

To put a face to this fainthearted, there are few better actors than Daniel Hendler, Daniel Burman's fetish interpreter at the beginning of this century with his roles as a timid young man in

Waiting for the Messiah, The Broken Embrace

and

Family Law.

His characteristically fascinating blandness, so mundane, so close, is perfect for capturing the deadpan expressiveness of the character.

Havilio's novel, written in a single paragraph without full stops, here becomes a fantastic idea, perhaps somewhat lengthened due to the lack of rhythm in the central nucleus, which, however, is full of humorous impulses loaded with meaning. .

Attitudes that almost always have to do with the collapse or maintenance of the couple, and with the difficulty of social relations in an environment of certain education.

But finally they could be summed up this way: killing an idiot is never easy, especially if it's ourselves.