Two Shots Fired

A key figure in New Argentine Cinema, writer and director Martín Rejtman’s first feature in ten years is a digressive and slyly funny low-key existential comedy. Deploying deadpan magic realism with a sly indifference to narrative expectations, the film offers careful, amused observation of how we all get through life, somehow. Rejtman establishes his strange, drifting world in the film’s first sequence, in which teenager Mariano (Rafael Federman) dances at a club till dawn, comes home, swims, mows the lawn, finds a gun, blankly fires two shots into his temple and stomach, then returns home from the hospital, barely injured and mowing the lawn again a week later. His mother Susana (Susana Pampin) is worried about him, but he says he just acted on impulse. The film then shifts focus to follow Susana on a hapless seaside vacation with another group of adult characters. The camera keeps an observational distance and the cast underplays emotion to deadpan Zen effect, crafting a film that finds sympathetic humor in the awkward and mundane. —Steve Mockus