Kamchatka Review

Kamchatka Review

Kamchatka has many features to be considered a masterpiece, it's cinema at its best, giftedwith a great strength of emotional impact. It is a tender, grievous and touching elegy.

Underneath the intense silent walls of captivity, it hides the thud and rage of the immeasurable collective tragedy. Underneath the silky, modest and elegant unfolding of events, there's aharsh and sudden representation of human sacrifice, pain and sorrow. Underneath the easily made appearance there is about the film, it reveals an exquisite and laborious job of calculated details, through the depths of the images. And underneath its smooth evidence,hidden rivers spring from the depths of the images with many and simultaneous readings of the poem, many films within just one.

Kamchatka takes place in an indefinite moment in time, short but obscure, remembered, and pulled out from death. That moment is right now, the current stream of conscience of the invisible narrator, a 35-year-old man who summons in the big screen his memories of the oppressive days that followed the genocidal coup d'etat in Argentina, in 1976. The narrator that owns the voice that wakes up and shapes the fathomless silence of those times, appears in the screen represented by a ten-year-old kid who, together with his younger brother, wander about sitting in the back seat of a small car two horses of their wandering parents, runaways who fled from their home searching for shelter anywhere safe from the hunting claw of the man who struck silently and with no soul, in Buenos Aires those days. Only for a few seconds do we see a military street control in the screen and yet the film -that develops with a prodigious use of ellipsis, insinuation and allusions- is the deepest and widest representation of that catastrophe ever featured in the cinema.

Our dictionary defines elegy -the term I used above to describe Kamchatka- as a "Poetic piece of writing where the death of someone or any other case or sorrowful event is wept ."

Outstanding elegies are: The river, by Jean Renoir, and The south, by Victor Erice, and How green was my valley!, by John Ford, and To kill a mockingbird, by Robert Mulligan, and Some place in the world, by Alfredo Aristarain. It is to this few but sublime kind that this humbly marvel belongs to, backed by a screenplay that is close to perfection by Marcelo Figueras, with a noble and highly precise direction by Marcelo Piñeyro, who faces sorrow and neverresorts to the easiness of emphasis.

Both genius and wit come together resulting in a lively creation by Cecilia Roth, Ricardo Darin and two astonishing kids, Matias del Pozo and Milton del Canal who, together with Tomas Fonzi, Hector Alterio and Fernanda Mistral in the supporting cast, they elaborate metaphors of elevated concepts and moral energy, like the image of the wounded bird, or the house that, with the few remains of life inside, becomes a symbol of the country's depletion. The legend of Houdini, king of the handcuffs; the suspicious calm of the eye of the storm; the tragic intuition of the drunk kid who thinks he's killed himself; the astonishment of an unreal starry night where the grown-up-kid frames his parents' idyll; the moment when the kid's father gets locked up in a telephone booth; the sudden and upsetting black out. And more and more calls to bring comfort to the elegy weeping.

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