Kékszakállú (Bluebeard). 2016. Argentina. Directed by Gastón Solnicki. Screenplay by Solnicki, Matt Porterfield. With Laila Maltz, Lara Tarlowski, Katia Szechtman, Denise Groesman. DCP. 72. In Spanish; English subtitles min.
This beguiling experimental narrative, loosely based on Béla Bartók’s opera Bluebeard’s Castle, follows a group of well-to-do Argentinean teenagers on holiday in the Uruguayan beach town of Punta del Este. The crisp lines and airless colors of modernist vacation homes where idle leisure days crawl by—“maximum artifice laid bare by a documentarian gaze,” in the filmmaker’s words—betray what lies beneath this artificial paradise. Back in Buenos Aires, the young women listlessly try their hand at school and work, but nothing sticks. Vivid passages from Bartók’s opera ring in asynchronous bursts throughout the spare, balletic portrait of youthful malaise and class privilege. Capturing, often wordlessly, the feeling of being adrift in one’s own life, the film ultimately hints at a path towards self-actualization through its tenderness towards its characters.