“My hands are like butter. Soft, like warm butter,” says Marcela, Thelma Biral’s character in marijuana smoke, after taking a couple of puffs on a joint amid the desperation that her husband is gay. Lucas Demare filmed in 1968, when marijuana was still demonized for being associated with death and drug trafficking, this classic of cannabis cinema that critics did not smoke and jokingly demanded that the film be made “celluloid smoke” for his effectiveness.
The path that links national cinema and cannabis had begun almost two decades earlier, when Leon Klimovsky presented in 1950 Drugwhich, like Demare’s later film, centers on a doctor who descends into the then-murky world of drug trafficking to clear up the death of his addicted wife.
Klimovsky began Drug with the plaque “this film is a tribute to our authorities, to whom we owe Argentina today to live free from that dreaded drug”, and immediately blames El Viejo de la Montaña and his “sect of drugged criminals”. in the West of “the killer herb”.
Since the advent of Drug, which came to represent the country in the prestigious official competition of the Cannes Film Festival, to this day the view of national cinema on cannabis has completely changed. Proof of them is the spectatorsthe film that Néstor Frenkel premiered last year with Santiago Calori and Federico Rotstein, two young friends who become addicted to watching Argentine thrillers on VHS after discovering the cinematic treatment of drug use.
Frenkel makes a historical review of the behavior of Argentine cinema in the face of marijuana. The director exploits the exploitation films of the seventies, with Enrique Carreras as its maximum expression, to expose the ridiculous vision of marijuana in times of dictatorship.
The drug addictswith the anthological sequence of the trance over a cane by Graciela Alfano, it is one of the highest points of that gaze.
substances
Frenkel also allows himself the pleasure of including the film from the 1980s among “the substances” that Santi and Roto consume on video Overdoseby Fernando Ayala. There, Noemí Frenkel, Néstor’s sister, plays a young stray woman who convinces the protagonist Gabriel Lenn to smoke before returning home, “totally, if you get a little mambeado, just go to bed”.
The young man wakes his mother upon entering, having broken three bottles of soda and most of the family crockery and suffers from hysterical laughter in front of his mother, while choking on a jelly.
the spectators becomes yet another drug exploitation film, but with the key difference that Frenkel prefers the mere exposition of that old cinema to avoid the drop of the line, a classic of the cannabis genre.
That maturity when it came to displaying marijuana was possible after decades in which the profile of the smoker changed, which began with the criminals who assaulted the Argentine family, then became the young men sentenced to death for “the scourge of the drug “. containment at home, and then it came to the much nicer and more harmless hanged hippie.
Néstor Montalbano proved it in flying birds on the trip to Uritorco by Diego Capusotto and Luis Luque. The comedians play former members of a rock band who are reenacted by the river, faso in hand, in the midst of an odyssey in search of an alien contact.
Enter Diego Peretti The theft of the century with his Fernando Araujo, ideologue of the Banco Río de Acassuso robbery, giving the compulsive smoker the complexity that national cinema had never been able to show. Araujo plans the robbery in Ariel Winograd’s film with absolute parsimony, far from the image of the hanged stoner.
The actor has used and abused marijuana, already in a more traditional tone, in the film adaptation of Have more respect from your mother, when he fills up on makeup to play a long-haired pizza-making grandfather who keeps getting lost and drives his daughter-in-law crazy. Peretti was also hilarious brave timefrom Damiano Szifronlike the smoking psychologist who has an epiphany in a police car when he discovers that the Happy birthday Y Plim Plim the clown share the tune.
Times have changed and the social progress that has taken place in the country regarding marijuana has its counterpart in the national cinema. Cannabis militancy films receive support from the INCAA to no surprise. The documentary mother plantby Lisandro Costa, Alejandro Espolsino and Francisco López, supports the struggle of a group of mothers for the legalization of cannabis oil.
Juan Manuel Suppa Altman and Martin Rieznik recur in the documentary A history of prohibition to the arrest of a young man who can be sentenced to fifteen years in prison for possession of medical marijuana oil to review and question, with the voice of journalist Martín Armada, Argentina’s war against drugs.
National cinema has accompanied Argentine society in the paradigm shift on marijuana and in the passage of the demand for condemnation from both the consumer and the distributor up to the claim of the need for laws that protect users.
POS
Source: Clarin
