MIFF Session 6: THE TANGO OF THE WIDOWER AND ITS DISTORTING MIRROR

Fixation. A middle aged man is confronted with his wife's suicide. He attempts to normalise his social and private lives but circles back repeatedly to the question of why she did it. A kind of haunting occurs in his apartment as her figure appears or just her wigs that course around the floor like pets or pests. Old memories recur: he shuts down her singing of Frere Jacques but this only brings back the tolling bells of judgement (or at least the church), conversations are resolved in different ways from their originals. At one point he seems to take his own life but this only results in the film reversing in a different edit until a conclusion emerges from the eerie doom of backwards motion and speech and a brilliantly resourceful use of verite lighting to convey a demonic figure in the close.

Raul Riuz abandoned this film through the necessity of having to leave his native Chile suddenly but it was reconstructed through lip readers nailing the dialogue and his widow's edit (taken in part through her dream dialogues with her deceased husband). The original intention was to have this examination of plea and guilt to be presented as blocks of images, like the movments of a piece of music or verses in a poem. As soon as you let go of an expectation of conventional narrative cinema this film is a delight of textures and moments of genuine emotion. The animate wigs on the floor (shown to be driven by toy cars) can be funny and eerie in the same sequence. The sight of a pair of feet disappearing under a bed is doubly disturbing in reverse. And so on. And so much more on.

This is anything but an hour of randomly spliced images or intentionally obscure scenes as the sense of purpose and statement develop before you can get restless and look somewhere else. IF you do start to shift a little in the second section where everything is running backwards in a different sequence than in the first half just run with it. You really will get somewhere soon. And you'll be glad you did.