Review: Medianeras (2011)
Cast: Javier Drolas ,Pilar López de Ayala
Director: Gustavo Taretto
Country: Argentina | Spain | Germany
Genre: Drama
Official Trailer: Here
Editor’s Note: Medianeras (Sidewalls) is available on DVD from MPI Home Video
In bustling and overpopulated Buenos Aires, Martín and Mariana live solitary lives in apartment complexes that are located across from each other. Like so many of their fellow denizens, they cross each other’s paths in the city—on the street, at bus stops, at pay phones, and in convenience stores—but they do not know each other, let alone glance at each other. Yet their lives are parallel to each other in multiple ways that, paradoxically, they may prove the exception to the rule that parallel lines never meet.
The film begins with a collage of the uneven examples of architecture in Buenos Aires and the way such unevenness images back the lives of the city’s inhabitants. Accompanied by a voiceover that is later revealed to be by the film’s male protagonist, Martín, this dry and droll perspective of architectural spaces and solitary lives in a big city sets the tone and theme for what is to come in the rest of the film. As Martín’s voiceover relates, Buenos Aires is witness to inventors of the culture of the renter, as shots of apartment complexes of diverse heights and architectural (non-) styles succeed each other. Martín concludes his voiceover by sharing his apartment coordinates. What follows is Mariana’s voiceover, which relates her own take of this vast and varied landscape of buildings, her own positionality in the midst of it all, and her own apartment coordinates.
Like a “he said, she said” repartee, the film stitches together Martín’s and Mariana’s voiceover-monologues to create different but parallel lives and a cynical yet endearing dialogue on city life, living in a digitally connected world but cut off from the social lives of those next door, and the details of being single. He is a website designer and so spends most of his time holed up in his apartment and living the virtual life. As he recounts at one point, he buys food online, reads newspapers online, meets people online, and even has sex online. She studied architecture, but in the meantime, she works as a designer of fashion window displays and her most constant companions are mannequins. For some time now, he has been living with the fact that his ex-girlfriend will never return to Argentina from the U.S., while she struggles to adapt to a single life following a very recent break-up. Despite their geographical proximity, Martín and Mariana continually fail to meet each other. But a chance encounter in an online chat session may be what ultimately puts them in contact with each other.
Like a “he said, she said” repartee, the film stitches together Martín’s and Mariana’s voiceover-monologues to create different but parallel lives and a cynical yet endearing dialogue on city life, living in a digitally connected world but cut off from the social lives of those next door, and the details of being single.
Medianeras is Argentine filmmaker Gustavo Taretto’s debut film, adapted from his 2005 award-winning short film of the same title. With the exception of the lead actress who plays the role of Mariana, Taretto makes no changes in the process of moving from short- to feature-length format, including the narrative development. But by sticking so closely to the letter of his short film, Taretto comes up with a mixed bag of pluses and minuses. On the one hand, he reveals the limitations of transforming a short into a feature-length work, while on the other hand he demonstrates his potential for more interesting, off-beat scenarios, perspectives, and visual composition.
This potential is evident in the film’s opening sequence, which repeats verbatim the beginning of the short film version. The juxtaposition between Martín’s dead-pan voiceover describing lives in the city, the absence of urban planning, and the montage of buildings and the Buenos Aires skyline provides a comical, somewhat sarcastic, and affectionate tone for the film, which will be unevenly sustained throughout the rest of the work. Unevenly sustained since Taretto is still getting his bearings in the world of the feature-length form. While his short film naturally minced no words, shots, or plot detail in the service of provoking and sustaining maximum affect and attention from the spectator in thirty minutes, the feature-length version suffers from too much (seemingly forced) dead time to fill up a feature-length running time of ninety-five minutes. In between missed encounters, voiceovers that accompany Martín’s or Mariana’s daily routine and their respective jobs, and city spaces, one would be hard-pressed to remember more details of what else occurs. While the short version provides just enough information on the daily lives of Martín and Mariano to make them mysteriously and comically interesting, the feature-length version ends up immersing the spectator in their daily spaces to the point of claustrophobia and even boredom.
While his short film naturally minced no words, shots, or plot detail in the service of provoking and sustaining maximum affect and attention from the spectator in thirty minutes, the feature-length version suffers from too much (seemingly forced) dead time to fill up a feature-length running time of ninety-five minutes.
What saves the feature-length version from flatlining altogether is the charismatic presence of its lead actors—Argentina’s Javier Drolas and Spain’s Pilar López de Ayala, who replaced Mariana Anghileri—and an appealing, witty visual style. The sequences with Mariana working on her fashion window displays provide a fantastical and existential frame-within-a-frame effect, while her comic interaction with mannequins in her apartment brings to the film a whimsical touch.
Taretto’s love letter to Buenos Aires and its energy, through the perspective of two young people whose oddities are both symptoms and consequences of where they live, demonstrates that a short film can be a wonderful platform for a debut feature film. At the same time, it also demonstrates the limits of stretching out a short film into a feature film, if done so at too literal a level. Despite its narrative shortcomings, the charisma of the film’s leads and the film’s architectural and design preoccupations make of Medianeras a charming, if not so easily memorable, film.
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