All roads lead to San Julian in director Carlos Sorín’s lovely Intimate Stories. It’s the existential last leg of a neurotic tour that a presumptuous businessman makes between different bakeries in the area, where a woman and her young child must go to after she wins a spot on a television show, and the place that promises to reunite a nearly-blind old man with the dog that abandoned him three years earlier.
Obsessed with a birthday cake that he looks to deliver to the child of a widowed mother, a love-struck Roberto (Javier Lombardo) voices Sorín and screenwriter Pablo Solarz’s obsession with fate and, more evocatively, the notion that failure can be an impetus for change. Poverty is very much a reality in the film, but it’s something the filmmakers chose to convey using small emotional gestures. For one, when María (Javiera Bravo) wins a food processor on the TV show Casino Multicolor, the importance of the item can be read all over the woman’s face. A fellow contestant on the show chooses to exploit María’s emotion, just as Roberto manipulates people to pander to his obsessive-compulsive needs—and it’s this disregard for other people’s emotions that the filmmakers earnestly believe their characters should be free of.
The sad Justo (Antonio Benedicti) struggles with a condescending family in Fitz Roy, and when a man tells him that he may have seen the old man’s dog in San Julian, Justo hitches numerous rides to the city, at once enticing and confounding people with his observations about life. Sorín delicately unpacks the old man’s baggage, revealing a fragile creature confused by a tragic accident that may have led to the dog’s disappearance. It’s the film’s crisscrossing narrative and sense of community that brings to mind Short Cuts, but the pursuit of enlightenment and the poetic textures of Sorín’s images evoke The Straight Story. Quiet and unpretentious, the film’s humanism isn’t confrontational exactly but it’s intense nonetheless.
Image/Sound
Though combing and ghosting are nil, edge enhancement and flecks are prominent throughout-an unspectacular transfer, yes, but the color palette has a certain spunk to it. As for the soundtrack, the surround work is adequate and dialogue is clear with no noticeable hiss.
Extras
Carlos Sorin, or someone pretending to be Sorin, narrates an 11-minute making-of featurette, a composite of behind-the-scenes footage that evokes a diary entry read aloud. Rounding out the disc are three trailers-one domestic, two foreign-for Intimate Stories, in addition to ones for My Mother’s Smile, Games of Love and Chance, Lost Embrace, and Sequins.
Overall
Carlos Sorin is on the road to becoming Argentina’s answer to Vittorio de Sica.
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