Fall-festival season invariably crowds-out some of its finer offerings. For all the sturm und drang surrounding a studio’s middling and formulaic awards hopeful, the same festival might screen a blissfully experimental feature that, despite actually achieving something new with narrative form, receives 1/20th the attention. And few movies this year supply purer pleasure than Alejo Moguillansky’s Pin de Fartie, which finds the great Argentine group El Pampero Cine (recently of La Flor and Trenque Lauquen) putting a spin on Samuel Beckett’s Endgame (known in its native tongue as Fin de partie) through a characteristically inventive structure and brilliant form. Ahead of tomorrow’s Venice debut and just ahead of NYFF screenings, there’s an English-subtitled trailer.
Here’s NYFF’s synopsis: “Produced by El Pampero Cine, the Argentine collective known for its boundless imagination in cinematic storytelling (La Flor, NYFF57 and Trenque Lauquen, NYFF60), Pin de Fartie unfolds as a playful spin on theatrical adaptation and an experiment in character dynamics. The film charts three relationships defined by Samuel Beckett’s 1957 play Fin de Partie (Endgame): one between a blind man and his daughter; another concerning two actors rehearsing that same text; the third following a man who reads his blind mother Beckett’s play and discovers that it reflects their lives. Director Alejo Moguillansky retains much of Fin de Partie’s choreography and structure, then carefully loosens it with comic acts of repetition and musical scoring. Surprises and revelations (a brilliantly staged tennis match, an in-joke based on a Martín Rejtman film) arrive continuously in a delightful film that affirms Pampero regular Laura Paredes as one of the greatest actors working today.”
Find the preview and poster below:
