Photo: Diego Lerman's Meanwhile
With Meanwhile, the effects of Robert Altman's cinema can now be traced to Argentina. Writer-director Diego Lerman intercuts episodes from the lives of several people living in Buenos Aires: a recently separated couple whose daughter develops a mysterious rash around her waist, another couple who is incapable of conceiving a child, a man who has to lay off a woman under his watch, and a maid who feels increasingly dehumanized by the tasks she's asked to manage. There are others as well, including a blind man with an ostensibly gigantic cock and a woman at a pet store—existing, like the many piles of poo a naughty dog repeatedly dumps inside its master's house, as a form of connective tissue. Lerman does not have Altman's visual grace, but he crisscrosses his stories well enough, conveying a palpable sense of uncertainty as the desperation of his characters come to a boil. Ed Gonzalez
With Meanwhile, the effects of Robert Altman's cinema can now be traced to Argentina. Writer-director Diego Lerman intercuts episodes from the lives of several people living in Buenos Aires: a recently separated couple whose daughter develops a mysterious rash around her waist, another couple who is incapable of conceiving a child, a man who has to lay off a woman under his watch, and a maid who feels increasingly dehumanized by the tasks she's asked to manage. There are others as well, including a blind man with an ostensibly gigantic cock and a woman at a pet store—existing, like the many piles of poo a naughty dog repeatedly dumps inside its master's house, as a form of connective tissue. Lerman does not have Altman's visual grace, but he crisscrosses his stories well enough, conveying a palpable sense of uncertainty as the desperation of his characters come to a boil. Ed Gonzalez
