opening up

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The Retirement – Latin American Competition – SBIFF

This is an Argentinian take of the ‘grumpy old man facing an unwanted situation that forces him to open up his heart’ story. In this case, it’s a old man entering retirement as a widow who wants to be left alone. However, his housekeeper disappears leaving him to look after her young son.

He faces a lot of opposition from his daughter in his choice to take care of the kid on behalf of his housekeeper. The way he spoils him makes his daughter jealous – he’s being the dad she didn’t get have because he was so obsessed with work. As per convention, the grumpy old man learns to love the young boy and opens himself up to learn to love his daughter again.

It’s a heartwarming film about retirement and life as an old widow. Perfect if you don’t want to think much. However, if you’re looking for something more than a film about grumpy old man that is forced to open his heart, you’ll probably be disappointed. The tropes are mostly obvious and expected. And when they’re not, they feel out of place and manipulative – such as the mum going into labour at the kids school (giving Rodolfo an opportunity to show his caring side to his daughter). It’s careful not to tread new territory. Although to be fair, this mid-range silver cinema fare is being budgeted out of Hollywood cinema these days.

Head to our Santa Barbara International Film Festival Hub for more reviews from the Santa Barbara International Film Festival 2020.

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Luxor – AFI Fest 2020

Luxor

Hanna starts Luxor looking like the typical ‘gone abroad to find yourself’ young white adult. She’s dressed in loose clothing, feels an other worldly connection to the foreign place, and sleeps around. However, whilst her character never completely loses this image in the film, our interpretation of her changes.

Instead of opening up, she becomes more closed emotionally as the film progresses. It doesn’t feel like we learn more about her. Scene by scene, her face becomes a canvas of lonely stoicism, even after she meets her former lover, Sultan. The only moment she breaks this facade in the first part of the film is when she automatically switches into ‘work-mode’ to help a tourist that faints. Otherwise she’s made a shell around her personality to defend herself against hardships.

Luxor could have slipped into the trap of exoticizing a foreign location from the perspective of an outsider. Whilst it does turn Ancient Egypt into a place for a white person to contemplate (side note: shout out to the British Museum), it feels self aware of what it’s doing. Hanna finds connections on her own organically, and other connections to the land through the eyes of a local Sultan. It also recognizes that tourists do visit Luxor to exoticize ‘the other’ by representing them in the spiritual group of westerners that followed the Grateful Dead, and the obnoxious American tourist from the opening. Again it just about avoids the trap of falling into the problematic ‘white girl finds herself in exotic location’.

Instead it uses the environment, and Hanna’s connection to it, to evoke nostalgia for Hanna’s past life with Sultan. We learn that this isn’t the first time she’s been to Luxor (having been here with Sultan earlier in life). Now she’s older, she has experienced trauma (that is only hinted at in the film), and her mind is in a different place. She’s seeing the same locations, but in a different light. Everything feels familiar, shown in her confident exploration of the place on her own, but it also feels different, as shown in her inquisitive interaction with the ruins. Her new connection to the place suggests that her return may be fated, and that she may have found her home and future.

Head to our AFI Fest Hub for more reviews and short films from AFI Fest 2020.