The Reconstruction

Description

Along a wintry highway, a close-up shot reveals a startling landscape: that of a man’s face, ravaged by who knows what cares, inward and unmoved even as he drives by a woman in distress on the side of the road. Taciturn is too kind (and too long) a word to describe Eduardo (Diego Peretti), an oilfield engineer, whose response to a dinner invitation from a coworker is “Why?” and whose more typical mode of communication is a forbidding silence. Nevertheless, Eduardo reluctantly embarks on a short trip to Patagonia at the request of old friend, Mario. In Ushuaia, the world’s southernmost city, the loner looks in as a stranger would on Mario’s middle-class home, a hive of dailiness and love. Then death enters, pulling rough-hewn Eduardo over the threshold and into the life of a suddenly bereft family who hardly know what to do with him. The Reconstruction’s beauty is in its challenge: to make an asocial character human. As in Bresson, empathy comes through the smallest revelations. Pay close attention to them, as the director Juan Taratuto and his star Peretti have so skillfully done. Each character in this fine ensemble contributes to the others’ redemption. In this way, love proves transmutable. –Judy Bloch

Trailer

//player.vimeo.com/video/90584189?autoplay=1

Film Details