White Elephant: too many nuts and low noise

Since he began his film career, Pablo Trapero has always been linked to a social cinema and claiming that conflicted with a style and beauty so refined and concise. Perhaps White Elephant may remain within the same parameters assertive but if one side seems to not want to get into shirts eleven staff in regard to religious and political criticism, as well stick to a more realistic aesthetic and dirty than usual, the other is dangerously close to melodramatic track, which ends up returning a movie interesting, but somewhat superficial.

Difficult to understand that the director of Crane World and Carancho Leonera not dared to call things by their name in white elephant. As explained in the film that have been the different administrations that have been delaying the completion of the work of the building to which it refers in its title, which was a pride, but it ends up symbolizing a shame. Exhibits, but not says. Neither reason nor guilty, or anything that may compromise any political ideology. Furthermore, although some sequence Julian himself (Ricardo Darin), he takes on the bureaucracy and lack of empathy from the church to the disadvantaged, not just report what we do makes sense on the whereabouts of the money allocated to pay the workers.

If no shortage of references to current social reality indignant, perhaps we can find the reasons which lead him to be so little explicit in pointing the finger at who, through his film is not only to denounce the corruption of the powerful, but perform a tribute to a religious, just as Julian, always kept next to the village. So the priests in white elephant protagonists are presented more as men as priests, with their doubts and sins, but I honestly think I would have gotten the same wetting a little more.

Yet White Elephant continues to be an entertaining and interesting film with great performances from its three protagonists, Ricardo Darin, Martina Gusman and Jérémie Renier in his first performance in Spanish but not enough to overlook other shortcomings. If your characters are well drawn and developing their personal conflicts (which are coming) while increasing the overall conflict that affects them all, there seems to be interested not really in depth how each overcomes his own contradictions or to offer solutions to them. Not that remain suspended for the viewer to decide where you want to continue, but simply leaves unresolved what looks like a strategy to divert attention towards the resolution of the film.

You may also weighed in over the distant influence of Cidade de Deus, more for the environment in which the story and thematic similarities in the way they develop both films. To make matters worse, in an attempt to give his film an aesthetic dimension, Traprero used in a couple of sequences of two songs composed by Michael Nyman, which although fabulous, serve only to dislodge the viewer. At least to this and probably those who can relate to one of the issues with the soundtrack for which was originally composed, The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover, which inevitably evokes the image of Helen Mirren wearing designs Jean Paul Gautier while fucks with her lover in a kitchen full of feathers, which seems to be the most appropriate attire for wandering through the ruins of the White Elephant.