No Weight Whatsoever

While Rosa wraps up her domestic cleaning tasks, Nicolas is adding the final touches to the piece of contemporary music his friends will be listening to in the evening, gathered in his Bogotá apartment. Two sisters live alone in the countryside, in the utmost bareness; a neighbor brings them some food, then takes them to the city where they’ll be looking for their missing parents. Two entirely different stories follow one another with no connections between them – except for the music of Orlando Jacinto Garcia, a composer of Cuban descent, and the state of mind predisposing his listeners to reverie. Cows too, moving from one reproduction of a Dutch painting over at Nicolas’s place to Colombian fields and pathways. Mauricio Arango adopts these silent animals’ placid attitude, and roughly the same distance from the story, its characters and their emotion, and the power of musical immersion in the landscape. Nothing has any weight, since nothing is supposed to make any sense at either end of the narrative break, beyond each story’s pure immanence. But is it really so light? When the composer catches by surprise his cleaning lady in full admiration of Albert Cuyp’s painting while she’s waiting to receive her paycheck, another break is introduced: one dividing a country, one splitting a population into separate worlds, social classes and ways of being close to each other and nothing to share. No weight: from weight to indifference, there is the passage. Arango suggests it; there’s no need to impose it. Subtlety, as well as unsettling duplicity, between what is quiet and what isn’t, of this landscape diptych. (C.N.)