From Afar

Venezuela got its name on the inter­na­tion­al film fes­ti­val suc­cess map in 2015 when Loren­zo Vigas’ From Afar scooped the top price at Venice. Maybe this was a great way to acknowl­edge a nation­al film scene in the ascent, but at the same time it places a lot of expec­ta­tion on a work which, all told, is small in scale and mod­est in intent. It’s solid­ly put togeth­er, and earns a lit­tle extra kudos for the fact that it’s a debut fea­ture, but the appar­ent pre­ci­sion of its con­struc­tion isn’t enough to mask that it real­ly doesn’t hold up to close scrutiny.

Alfre­do Cas­tro, the Chilean actor known for play­ing intense weirdos in Pablo Lar­rain movies, plays an intense weirdo named Arman­do who, in the open­ing scene, is observed fol­low­ing a young man on to a bus and flash­ing a wad of cash at him. Cut to his dim­ly-lit apart­ment where Arman­do is slumped in his favourite com­fy chair as the now semi-nude youth stands a few meters in front of him. He’s polite­ly asked to strip while Arman­do duti­ful­ly gets his rocks off. No phys­i­cal con­tact is made.

By day Alfre­do makes den­tures, while all of his free time appears to be ded­i­cat­ed to prey­ing on large­ly work­ing class men. He tries his luck with gang mem­ber Elder (Luis Sil­va), who at the moment of truth decides to turn the tables, whack Alfre­do over the head and scarp­er with his wal­let. Bizarrely, Alfre­do feels no resent­ment towards the young tyro. If any­thing, his mind is fixed on get­ting clos­er to him, enter­ing into his world, going all-out to earn his love.

Vigas obscures the moti­va­tions of the two leads for much of the film. About half-way through, it’s clear that he’s lead­ing towards a big reveal. Yet, when the film ends, the feel­ing is that Vigas has sup­plied an answer to a ques­tion which he didn’t ask. While the rela­tion­ship between the men feels cred­i­ble on a strict­ly per­for­mance-based lev­el, the rea­sons why these peo­ple choose to do what they do sel­dom has a basis in under­stand­able real­i­ty. Char­ac­ters alter their tem­pera­ment and depart from their social sets on a churl­ish whim.

On the plus side, Vigas is obvi­ous­ly a direc­tor who has tak­en great pains over each shot, mak­ing sure the fram­ing is as he wants it and the per­for­mances are del­i­cate­ly cal­i­brat­ed towards real­is­ing his grand, over-arch­ing vision. But some of the choic­es he makes only serve to obfus­cate rather than clar­i­fy mat­ters. It’s an impres­sive, albeit deeply flawed film that is too busy play­ing sleight of hand games to express any­thing of real value.