Coinciding with the celebration of International LGBT Pride Day, which is celebrated today, Sunday, June 28 worldwide, the Association of PCI Film Directors presents a retrospective of the work of the Argentine filmmaker Marco Berger. It can be seen for free until July 17 through the Virtual Room of the platform Movie Bridges
. The invitation will allow you to tour six of the seven feature films that make up the filmography of this prolific director, ranging from his debut feature Plan B (2009) until A blond (2019), his second-to-last work, in addition to Absent (2011), Hawaii (2013), Mariposa (2015) and Taekwondo (2016), the latter directed in tandem with his colleague Martín Farina. The program is completed with three short films: One last will (2007), The watch (2008) and Platero (2010). From the PCI they announce that it is the first retrospective to be carried out in the country of the work of this director, whose films were released and awarded at several of the most prestigious film festivals in the world, including Berlin and San Sebastián. It is, then, a great opportunity to get to know in depth a unique work within the rich universe of contemporary Argentine cinematography.
Berger’s cinema has a well-defined identity that allows his films to be immediately recognizable, both formally and in content. Within the first section, the director stands out for the classic elegance with which he approaches his stories, invariably linked to stories that revolve around the sexual awakening of young men. Accurate and methodical, your camera is always in the exact spot from which the viewer can witness the way in which the characters relate to their context. And paying special attention to the way in which the resulting systems influence the construction of the emotional bonds that emerge between its protagonists.
In that sense, it can be said that Berger is passionate about detail. Firstly, because of the meticulous way in which he builds those relationships that have desire as the center, although the characters do not always know what to do to access it. But that detail is also clearly manifested in the patience and determination that the director puts into touring the male body, with the intention of making that desire (or at least part of it) spill from the screen to the audience. A gesture as generous as it is subversive, as it offers the viewer the possibility of, while the film lasts, Observe the world outside of the ubiquitous heterosexual mandate.
All of that was present in his debut, Plan B, a romantic comedy with something of a late initiation story, in which a young man who is angry plans to take revenge by getting up with his ex-girlfriend’s new partner. For this Berger appeals to a daily record that bets on empathy. “What better way to naturalize homosexual desire, to make it an everyday thing, than to naturalize the film that contains it?“Horacio Bernades asked himself rhetorically and from these same pages when the film was released in 2009.” It would be the best way for the viewer to recognize himself in it. That you feel part and live it as a mirror ”, completed the critic at the time. It is there where the director’s work seems to make a foothold, in the search to expand the rigid framework that keeps the concept that separates the natural (or normal) from what is supposed to be not closed. Far from the bombastic gesture of the one who breaks spears with the sole intention of provoking, Berger tries to filter into common sense and in that task the use he gives to narrative genres is disturbing.
Because if Plan B the filmmaker turned to the mold of romantic comedy, almost a naturalistic tangle comedy, in Absent He works on the thriller, the perfect genre to stage the seduction game that a teenager launches to try to get the attention of his physical education teacher. In Absent – winner of the Teddy award for the best LGBT film at the Berlinale 2011 – the perverse and above all guilt play a vital role in an account of an almost Polanskian atmosphere, on which the director exposes some ethical and even moral disquisitions, which they take as a center a case of harassment of strange configuration. “What I do is give a twist to the imaginary of that fantasy of the teacher who harasses the student, so that the public feels cornered and says: Look if this happens to me,” Berger himself revealed to Marina Navarro during a interview
published in 2011 in the supplement Soy of Page 12. The statement makes explicit the intention of the filmmaker to target the subjectivity of the viewer, once again appealing to empathy.
From Absent guilt will also be an element that appears with some recurrence in Berger’s filmography. Some of that marks the relationship between the characters in Hawaii, a blond and up to The hunter, his latest film, which has just been released and although it is not part of this retrospective, can be seen on the Cinear Play platform. Repressive feeling par excellence, guilt also works in Berger’s cinema as a rope pulled towards the public. It is their burden that allows us to understand the difficulty faced by those who find themselves in the circumstance of not recognizing themselves in the narrow mirror of a normality that leaves many people out. Perhaps there, in his ability to enlarge the mirror, lies the great merit of his films. Daring to look beyond the frame to find a new reflection is the challenge for viewers.
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