{"id":13426,"date":"2020-02-18T21:00:49","date_gmt":"2020-02-19T02:00:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/?p=13426"},"modified":"2020-02-15T15:32:06","modified_gmt":"2020-02-15T20:32:06","slug":"rojo-2018-benjamin-naishtat","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/archives\/13426","title":{"rendered":"Rojo (2018, Benjam\u00ed\u00adn Naishtat)"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>This period thriller-thing was an improvement over <em><a href=\"\/journal\/archives\/1345\">Belmonte<\/a><\/em>.  As with that movie, it&#8217;s sometimes hard to tell what it&#8217;s adding up to narratively, but it effectively builds atmosphere.  Where this is all going must be more apparent to Argentinians of a certain age than it was to me.  I did notice that whenever two dudes have a disagreement, one of them ends up disappeared into the desert, which gave me flashbacks to the post-Pinochet doc <em><a href=\"\/journal\/archives\/9934\">Nostalgia for the Light<\/a><\/em>.<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"\/journal\/image20\/rojo4.jpg\"><\/p>\n<p>Dar\u00c3\u00ado Grandinetti (from <em><a href=\"\/journal\/archives\/111\">Talk to Her<\/a><\/em>) publicly psychoanalyzes a rude stranger into freaking out and committing suicide.  Neighbors call Dar\u00c3\u00ado &#8220;counselor,&#8221; but he&#8217;s obviously not a mental health counselor, just a respected lawyer, who is close with government man Vivas who wants to &#8220;buy&#8221; a house that isn&#8217;t on the market because its previous owners disappeared before they could sell (leaving behind bloody handprints, how sloppy), so now the paperwork&#8217;s all a mess.<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"\/journal\/image20\/rojo1.jpg\"><\/p>\n<p>Eventually a famous Chilean detective (Pablo Larra\u00c3\u00adn regular Alfredo Castro, the dog trainer in <em><a href=\"\/journal\/archives\/11411\">The Club<\/a><\/em>) will come around asking questions about the suicided man, who turns out to be Vivas&#8217;s wife Mabel&#8217;s brother.  While we wait for the detective plot to kick in, all the sidetrack scenes are intriguing&#8230; Mabel freaks out at a museum&#8230; a government official welcomes three American cowboys whose performance was postponed by a previous official&#8230; Dar\u00c3\u00ado&#8217;s family attends a slow-mo rodeo and has a great time while an animal is slaughtered to mournful string music&#8230; his wife encounters a stranger while peeing in the woods during an eclipse.<\/p>\n<p><em>The Wives:<\/em><br \/>\n<img decoding=\"async\" src=\"\/journal\/image20\/rojo3.jpg\"><\/p>\n<p><em>The Men:<\/em><br \/>\n<img decoding=\"async\" src=\"\/journal\/image20\/rojo2.jpg\"><\/p>\n<p>According to <a href=\"https:\/\/www.patreon.com\/posts\/rojo-benjamin-23986127\">Michael Sicinski<\/a>, Naishtat is &#8220;a highly experimental filmmaker aim[ing] for greater accessibility,&#8221; so it&#8217;s be interesting to see his earlier features.  I remember hearing things in Cinema Scope about <em>El Movimiento<\/em>.  V. Rizov <a href=\"https:\/\/filmmakermagazine.com\/105867-tiff-2018-critics-notebook-5-her-smell-rojo-a-faithful-man\/\">in Filmmaker<\/a> summarizes Rojo: &#8220;A really unpleasant lawyer kills a guy because he can and then commits all kinds of similarly unsavory bullshit.  The movie is, nonetheless, very fun&#8230;&#8221; and Adam Nayman <a href=\"https:\/\/cinema-scope.com\/cinema-scope-online\/rojo-benjamin-naishtat-argentina-brazil-france-netherlands-germany-platform\/\">writes more<\/a> about cynicism and disappearance.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This period thriller-thing was an improvement over Belmonte. As with that movie, it&#8217;s sometimes hard to tell what it&#8217;s adding up to narratively, but it effectively builds atmosphere. Where this is all going must be more apparent to Argentinians of a certain age than it was to me. I did notice that whenever two dudes [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[1049,477,629,2618,2513,2619,607],"class_list":["post-13426","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-movie","tag-2010s","tag-animal-slaughter","tag-argentina","tag-benjamin-naishtat","tag-disappearance","tag-eclipse","tag-suicide"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13426","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13426"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13426\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13453,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13426\/revisions\/13453"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13426"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13426"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13426"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}