I'm a Stranger Here Myself

In Fantasma, another film of intermediate length making its Cannes premiere on the same day as Signs, the 31-year-old Argentine filmmaker Lisandro Alonso spends an hour imagining what might happen if Argentino Vargas, the nonprofessional "star" of Alonso's extraordinary 2004 feature Los Muertos, were to get lost inside Buenos Aires' Teatro San Martin theater complex on his way to a screening of the film. (Also on his way to the screening, and similarly lost, is none other Misael Saavedra, who starred in Alsono's 2001 debut feature, La Libertad.)

On my own way to see Fantasma, an Argentine film critic friend advised me, only half-jokingly, that in order to properly understand the film, one must not only be Argentinian, but be familiar with Alonso's previous work and the building plan of the Teatro San Martin — a sprawling complex that houses seven performing arts halls, multiple gallery spaces and the offices of a couple of in-house theater companies. Well, two out of three ain't bad: while I can't claim Argentine citizenship, I have seen Alonso's films and I did spend a great many hours ensconced in the San Martin's tenth-floor Leopoldo Lugones cinema during the 2004 edition of the Buenos Aires Film Festival. So trust me when I say that this is a building in which there are many possibilities for detour, and it's little wonder that so much of Fantasma takes place in stairwells and elevators.

But I would argue that no "insider" knowledge is required to appreciate Fantasma's highly playful study of architecture and space and time, as Vargas and Saavedra, who hail from rural areas far removed from Buenos Aires' bustling center, pass unnoticed through the building's various floors, observing men and machines going about their daily business. Whereas Alonso's first two features (which detailed, respectively, the daily life of a woodcutter and the homeward journey undertaken by a recently released convict) were notable for their church-mouse quiet, Fantasma represents one of the most complex and sophisticated uses of sound in a movie I've heard in years. It is the city as perceived by unaccustomed country ears, full of car alarms, toilet flushes and airplanes passing by, all as if we were hearing them all for the first time. Dialogue, however, is employed as sparingly as if Alonso had to pay a steep tax for each word, and watching Fantasma, I thought about the significant number of directors working in world cinema today (from Alonso to Claire Denis to Sophia Coppola) who have grown tired of storytelling through dialogue, and how many others might be wise to follow their example.

The penultimate joke of Fantasma is that, when Vargas finally arrives at the Los Muertos screening, he is the only one in the audience — a highly plausible happening, given that Alonso's films have been barely distributed on his home turf, let alone elsewhere. Of course, it's one of those ageless ironies that many great artists are not duly recognized in their own lifetimes, either by their own countrymen or by the world at large. But by continuing to present the work of filmmakers like Lisandro Alonso and Eugène Green, Cannes makes a valiant stab at curbing that trend.

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