Al centro de la tierra / To the center of the earth

Fiction can sometimes do justice to refinement. The screenplay isn’t there anymore to crack the whips of the plot and intensify its ornamentation, but rather to induce tiny movements, to seize subtleties, to give way to melancholy with no other motive than existence itself. Here is what Daniel Rosenfeld achieves in a discreet and harrowing manner. Within sublime stony landscapes, the Argentinian filmmaker placed an elderly man, his young boys and a few other characters. But an important detail is that this experienced man is driven by a belief: he thinks he saw aliens, he thinks he filmed them, he plans on finding the secret of their tourism in our world. His children look at their father and film him, too. Very few words are pronounced, not as a desire for mutistic solemnity, quite the opposite: because we understand very well that it is mostly about surfaces – surface of the earth, surface of the sky, surface of the images. And about how a whole existence, including in the faith prompting him to penetrate its meaning, can wish to confront another dimension. That other dimension – we’ll grasp it soon enough thanks to the affectionate humour exuded by Rosenfeld – intersects with the cinematic dimension, either through the video handled by the protagonists, or through the cinegenic aspect of the landscapes which look like science-fiction films’ quotations, tombs for the eye. (JPR) Daniel Rosenfeld