International premiere / first film

DILETANTE

Dilettante

Kris Niklison

ARGENTINA
2008
Colour
DVcam
72’

Original version
Spanish
Subtitles
English
Photography
Kris Niklison
Sound
Santiago Pereson
Editing
Kris Niklison et Felipe Guerrero

Production
Kris Niklison
Co-production
Lita Stantic

Dilettante is a paradoxical watchword. Yet this is the word chosen long ago by Bela Jordan, an octogenarian Argentinean who lives in the country in a house on the banks of the river Parana, with her cook and handyman. The director (her daughter) offers us a portrait that highlights a highly colourful character, one that strikes us as being both from another century and yet ageless. If of necessity the film yields to the genre and retraces the old lady’s ways, her liking of games, her discovery of the jigsaw, her comical thoughts (“We regret our good actions more than the bad ones” could for example sum up her hedonist philosophy) and her incredible conversations with her cook, all is nevertheless carried out against an exuberant landscape background that features more than just as a natural décor, but as a magnified echo of a personality that has conquered its singularity.
As a result, the film wavers: are we with Courteline or Faulkner? The gardener character would tip the scales in favour of the latter, miserable wretch that he is, a mute in love with his boss, always fearfully watching out if she should pass away. But in reality it is its mix, in detonating both bourgeois comedy and Argentine epic, that the film risks as much in editing as in its clever, precise and touching use of sounds.

Jean-Pierre Rehm