https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z3kDomRsgfI
Gonna head WAY south of the border for this one.
The Argentine director Pablo Fendrik presents “Ardor” as a “machete western” — that is, a western transplanted to the thick rain forests of South America — but its plot draws just as much from Tarzan as from Sergio Leone, with a dusting of magical realism.
In this contemporary frontier tale, Gael García Bernal (“Rosewater”) plays a Man With No Name — though the credits call him Kaí — who emerges from a river to arrive at the subsistence-level tobacco farm that João (Chico Díaz); his daughter, Vânia (Alice Braga); and a handyman are trying to protect from mercenaries sent to steal the land for a lumber company.
The reviews, including this one in there NYT, are lukewarm, but I’ll be hunting this movie down. Too many Frontier Partisan elements to pass up — and I have a hunch it’ll have more appeal for the likes of me than it might for a feller from the NYT.
That hunch is reinforced by the review on Henry’s Western Roundup:
Cinematographer Julian Apezteguia captures the beauty and menace of the jungle in a film which rarely travels indoors. At times too deliberate in its pacing, it is a story of isolated, frontier lives, and it is a bare bones story in many ways…. All of the performances are naturalistic and utterly believable. The unselfconsciously beautiful Alice Braga is the only woman in the cast, strong without being a superwoman, and her character, with so much on her plate, is unaware of the desire she stirs about her. Gael Garcia Bernal also is not superhuman – he plays his character as the right man in the right place at the right time, despite others seeing him as something more.
Yeah, that’s gonna be worth a look.
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