Almost ten years. We declare ourselves more fans of Damián Szifron than of Los Simuladores. Let’s think about how he wrote the character of Bombita Darín more than his interpretation Ricardo Darin. We meekly surrender to his creativity, his brilliant mind, his low profile as an attribute. Ten years almost without knowing anything about him until the recent premiere of Misanthrope.
And what happened? We rushed to see the latest news about Szifron. So short.
When it came time to remove the voice, the word “misanthrope” didn’t come out and we asked for the last of Szifron. We called the director and they understood us. This is already talking about a brand.
attractive boot
The film begins as a Kiss recital. Impossible not to take popcorn and, if you don’t have it, go out and buy it. Fireworks, New Year’s Eve, shots, dead bodies everywhere. The beginning of the film is more attractive than the trailer of any film.
Incredible, you think: the guy came to Hollywood to impose the rules of his own genre game.
Wow, man, there’s our Quentin Tarantino! damien “fuck” Szifron, you tell yourself and squeeze elbows with the person next to you, who doesn’t know you, but perfectly understands the pride that comes from being Argentinian. It even occurs to you that the singer of The fly I dedicate a song to him.
See the beginning as saying: “I’m following you from Cemento”. You see the scene with mixed emotions and remember its beginnings, far and long ago, with The bottom of the sea. How far you’ve come, Damien!
It’s like a triumph. As if an Argentinian boxer won at Madison Square Garden.
political correctness
But as the minutes go by the excitement fades to a sense that it could be another movie about another serial killer. The initial fireworks, which threatened to hit, It ends with a kind of disappointment that translates into a corridor sentence: “Looks like one from Netflix“.
Furthermore, useless, boring dialogues steeped in political correctness and a police force at the antipodes of Palermo division. The annoyance is consolidated with a solemnity of the plot which ends, unfortunately, with the soft metaphor of a murderer “victim of the system” (vegan!).
Too sweetened. So much so that the suspicion arises that the fireworks at the beginning are an allegorical figure of all the exaggerations that we will see in the development.
The misanthrope kicks to the center of the arc. We imagine our stellar director had to accept all the rules of the #Me tooas if his landing in the English language meant paying the minimum rate and exiting the formula of The simulatorsits eminently masculine top series.
All this to write to gay detective and a super focused and intelligent policewoman. After a while we will have a bad taste in our mouth. Not even bittersweet. And we are concerned about Szifron and its possible mimesis with any director who wants a commercial product with little artistic caliber.
Moreover, it is understood that the co-author, the Jonathan Wakehamhe effectively filled the role of “creative spy”, overseeing or limiting the imaginative task of our beloved filmmaker.
We’ve been waiting for him for almost ten years and it wouldn’t even occur to us to identify ourselves if, by any chance, he were to win the Oscar.
Source: Clarin
