'Blondi': a meteorite in Argentine cinema

One believes that there are no new ways of counting, or that no one can think of them. And then it happens. It could be called "Licorice Pizza effect", the film by Paul T. Anderson, that which comes when you discover something that does not look like anything. A few days ago I saw Blondi, the debut as a film director of Argentine actress Dolores Fonzi. When someone talented – she is – ventures down a new path, the question arises: was it necessary? I don't know if she needed it. I do. I was immersed in the same joy that games produce at nap time and in the amazement of having witnessed the appearance of an unknown object in the national cinema. The film tells the story of Blondi, played by Fonzi. He is in his early 30s, lives with his son – he has been 15 – works doing surveys, smokes marijuana all day. His mother is singular; his sister, "normal." Blondi is a living, contradictory instrument that reacts to what is put in front of it as it is put in front of it. It has no bitterness, it does not produce epiphanies. With an anecdote that is blurred and that, deep down, does not exist – how do you tell "life"? – Fonzi is an emancipated and gluttonous director who says "out with the conventions, out with the customs, out with the touching dialogues", and gives herself all the pleasures, including the tricks of transforming her artifact at all times into something else: A parody, a road movie, a horror movie. It could last seven hours and it would be seven hours of happiness. I met Fonzi at a party last year. I asked him how the shoot had been. "Pure bliss," he replied. In the final scene, the two sisters sing Blondie's Maria aboard a beat-up car. They go forward, where you never know what's there. More life, sure, but that's all you know. In a world where the suffering associated with creation has all the prestige, Fonzi won without suffering. I can hardly wait for his next victory.

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