The Window
Dir: Carlos Sorin
Rating: 3.0
Film Movement
85 minutes
Carlos Sorin's The Window opens with the sound of a silent film camera cranking, the light fading up into a dim, hazy room and a pretty young woman leaning in towards the camera. The narrator, Antonio (Antonio Lorreta), tells us we're looking up at the face of his babysitter from his crib, which he is now dreaming of 80 years after the fact. "What corner of my mind did it disappear to?" he wonders. Her face fades away and we never see it again.
Antonio is bedridden in a little mansion in the Argentinean countryside, a successful writer nearing the end of his life. His days are mostly filled with the sounds of flies buzzing and clocks ticking; the one window in his room lets in such light that what's outside can't be discerned, there's nothing but an overblown white glow. Once a day he walks to it and the light fades into a landscape, which he takes in quickly before being sent back to bed by his tirelessly firm nurses.
At some point, he rebels and walks right out, wheeling his IV behind him, and we follow him on his stroll. The vitality of life he experiences outside, and the constant, almost supernatural sense of activity is beautiful in this sequence, easily the highlight of the film. A dog skips by, horses run off in the distance, a man walks past; somehow all of these things are transformed into momentous events, but then Antonio collapses from the strain and waits until he is found and brought home.
The story could more or less end here, but it goes on. The Window toes the line between being a really great film and kind of an expected one as a consequence. In its more scaled down form, the film becomes a textural exploration of a man's life as it approaches its end. In its longer form, the film becomes an occasionally interesting, occasionally pointed and unsubtle examination of the way we experience memory.
Some of the nicest moments involve one of its least interesting characters, Antonio's estranged son, Pablo (Jorge Diez), a renowned European concert pianist. The reasons for their separation are never explained, but they're alluded to: The piano tuner Antonio's hired for a last minute fix-up of Pablo's childhood instrument discovers toy soldiers in its strings, which Pablo later pockets. Was it self-sabotage, rebellion against unwanted pressures, a mistake? More important than its cause is the separation itself - when Pablo looks out the window in a replicated, and inverted, version of Antonio's landscape-revealing over-the-shoulder zoom from earlier, all he sees outside is black. This is their shared experience.
But, while the relationship itself is interesting, Pablo is nothing more than a stern yuppie stereotype. Terse, black-suited, shades-wearing; all bases covered. His wife is even more of a reduction; all she does is check her cell phone reception. Even if something interesting can be said about the way these people relate to one another, it's of much less consequence than it could have been if they themselves were interesting. The fact that Antonio is occasionally mean to his nurses and that one character spends the entire film's run-time tuning a piano for him in his mansion isn't addressed in the scope of this one-sided and unnecessary comparison, because their wealth (the thing that is essentially used to criticize them and simplify the contrast between them and Antonio) isn't actually an issue at all.
If Pablo's wife is so objectionable, then why is she given the film's final grand moment, the obligatory re-manifestation of Antonio's ghostly babysitter? And for that matter, why is the babysitter his sole recurring memory image in the film, when he tells people of other moments in his life that are of far greater interest than that one? Returning to the original image of his life is fine, if expected, as a concluding moment, but the absence of other echoes from throughout his life reveals the hollowness of Sorin's chosen refrain, an oversimplification of the complex feelings he attempts to explore. It's a pleasure to look at and sit through, but you never really get what the point is.
by Andrei Alupului