Kekszakallu

Keszakallu is Gaston Solniki's 2016 film out of Argentina.  It originally premired in Baltimore, MD, at the 2017 Maryland Film Festival.  I missed it in the film festival, but was able to catch it when it came back to the Parkway theater for it's theatrical run.

The movie takes a fly on the wall approach of the lives of several daughters of the wealthy industrialists of Argentina.  This film, much like Porto, did not have a linear plot line or direction it chose to go for the feature length.  While both were short feature films under 90 minutes, Solniki was able to achieve far more visual feats that Klinger was unable to achieve in Porto.

The title of the movie, is taken from the Spanish title of an opera, and included music from the opera while on board a ferry, in the midst of a sausage making plant.  While it was frequently hard to determine the scatter plot approach of the story line, and it only seemed to have one partial resolution to some of the young lady's stories, it was easy to get caught up in the whirlwind of the well framed scenes.  The only downside is that for many of these, there was no real semblance of a connection, and it was often hard to keep track of who was who, and if there was a relationship between the large cast and what those connections may have been.


While I feel it was an interesting approach to the beginning of Argentina's turn into an economic recession, I would have enjoyed a little more glue to the stories and how the women were connected a bit more.

There were some wonderful stark contrasts of the natural beauty of Argentina, with pool scenes, scenes in a country estate, fields, contrasted with the developments of the rising sprawls of cities, pools, and machinery of the industrial workforce.  There were art references lost on me, as I haven't done much with art history, or with the idea of theater or operas, so that side was lost on me.  I did enjoy the photography approach to how the movie was framed.  It just would have been better served with a more developed plot and character development and distinctions.