The Guardian - 06.09.2019

Section:GDN 12 PaGe:9 Edition Date:190906 Edition:01 Zone: Sent at 5/9/2019 17:10 cYanmaGentaYellowblac

• The Guardian
  Friday 6 September 2019 9
  Reviews Film

It Chapter Two

★★☆☆☆

Dir Andy Muschietti

Starring Bill Skarsgård, Jessica

Chastain, Bill Hader

Length 169 mins Cert 15

It’s back. The second half of Stephen

King’s horror bestseller about the

creepy clown has now been adapted

as a separate, but frankly laborious

fi lm to follow the fi rst one. That

was the story of a bunch of middle-

school kids in a small American town

in the 1980s banding together to

defeat a homicidal harlequin of hell

called Pennywise. Now almost 30

years later for Chapter Two, they are

all grown up and must return to their

hometown and face the horrible

Pennywise again – as adults.

There is some lively stuff here,

some sensational iconic cameos and

interesting ideas about confronting

your personal demons, about

homophobia, abuse, depression,

about the ubiquitous availability

of the past in the digital age. But it

becomes a virtual non-narrative

anthology of standard jump-scares

that could be reshuffl ed and shown

in any order. The second time

around your tolerance for this is

tested to destruction because, unlike

the fi rst movie, it is just so epically

and pointlessly long – approaching

three hours, with our heroes fi nally

beginning to assume a glassy-eyed

solemnity like Hogwarts graduates

or the fellowship of the ring.

Chapter Two seems to consist

of an indefi nite number of

big, scary set pieces, featuring

interchangeable snaggle-toothed

creatures, or occasionally gigantic

fairground-sized monsters lurching

grotesquely up out of nowhere. The

scenes deliver reasonably effi cient

scares, but with the tension level

repeatedly and disconcertingly

reset afterwards to zero. It feels

as if the movie is jumping the

shark and jumping back again,

increasingly spending more and

more time the wrong side of the

shark and fi nally staying there.

The thought of these people

lumbering back as oldsters in

Chapter Three to do the same

old scary-movie things with

Pennywise all over again fi lls my

heart with the kind of dread that

nothing here approached. PB

Hidden shame and bursts of rage

in the land of the disappeared

questions about the government’s

destruction of civil liberties. (The US

connection may be a subtle nod to

Henry Kissinger’s covert enthusiasm

for the junta.)

The action is focused on a small

town, where smug lawyer Claudio

(played by Dario Grandinetti)

is at a restaurant waiting for his

wife, Susana (Andrea Frigerio),

to join him. Seated all alone and

accepting cordial and respectful

waves from dignitaries present

at other tables, he gets into an

argument with a lone stranger who

resents being made to stand and

wait for a table: an argument with

a terrible outcome, the thought of

which Claudio will spend the rest

of the movie suppressing.

He gets involved in a crooked

scam with a businessman friend

to fabricate bogus ownership

documentation relating to that

abandoned villa, so that it can be

sold on by them at a profi t. Claudio

and his iff y pal go for a brazen

exploratory wander around the

house, with its eerie emptiness

and bloodstains on the wall – an

image of their own psychological

mansions, and of Argentina itself.

Eventually, guilty Claudio must

confront a detective, played by

the Chilean actor Alfredo Castro,

who is to bring a biblical zeal to his

work. Claudio is at a nexus of all

sorts of tense, uncomfortable and

bizarre situations, which the movie

anthologises. Grandinetti, with his

talent for sleek middle-aged conceit,

will be familiar from another recent

Argentinian fi lm, Damian Szifrón’s

portmanteau comedy Wild Tales

(2014), in which he played one

of the obnoxious people aboard

a passenger fl ight. That was a

contemporary-set fi lm that showed

the prevailing mood in Argentina

was bronca , or rage, and that’s

the mood here : the rage simmers,

bubbles, sometimes subsiding and

sometimes erupting.

Claudio is a keen tennis

player and there is a bizarre

locker-room moment when he is

getting changed and another guy,

thoughtfully cleaning his rifl e,

asks Claudio what he thinks of

the political situation. Of course,

Naishtat is fully aware of Chekhov’s

rule about what happens to a gun

which is introduced in act one.

Rojo is also in some sense about

the return of the repressed: denial

as a way of life. In this way it also

resembles Lucretia Martel’s The

Headless Woman (2008), a fi lm in

which a guilty act shimmers at the

very edge of our fi eld of vision, a

crime that has been vigorously but

only semiconsciously erased, like

fi ngerprints on a car window.

Intriguingly, the colour palette

of Rojo is of a world that has been

scorched and bleached like a

photograph left out in the sun, a

memory that has been degraded. It’s

a disquieting parable of iniquity.

punctuated by outbursts of anger,

out of shame that they hadn’t

spoken up and fear that the same

thing could happen to them, too.

The elephant that had once been in

the room had now vanished, and

nobody wanted to say a thing about

it. (That is until the courageous

Mothers of the Plaza De Mayo

protest movement, composed of

women demanding to know what

had happened to their children.)

Here is a world in which the

owners of an elegant villa have

“left the country”, leaving their

property to be looted by the

polite neighbours, where a local

businessman’s rebellious brother-

in-law, nicknamed “the hippie”,

dematerialises, where a teenager

vanishes on his way home from a

party, and where a cheesy nightclub

conjurer has a magic box that makes

audience volunteers disappear.

Rojo, or Red, is set in 1975, just

before the coup d’etat that installed

Argentina’s military junta. In this

nation, with its romantic fondness

for macho rodeo displays, some

blandly besuited politicians

are shown welcoming a visiting

delegation of cowboys from the

US, giving press conferences

about this gesture of friendship,

and then frowning at impertinent

★★★★☆

Dir Benjamin Naishtat

Starring Dario Grandinetti, Andrea

Frigerio, Alfredo Castro

Length 109 mins Cert 15

W

hat must it

have been like

to live with

Argentina’s

desaparecidos

phenomenon?

They were the “disappeared”

ones who in the mid-70s began

to be removed from their homes

for leftism or trade unionism

• spirited away without a trial,
  without a trace. This subtly
  disturbing, queasily tense satirical
  nightmare from 33-year-old
  Argentinian fi lm-maker Benjamin
  Naishtat answers that question
  with a story of group neurosis and
  complicit wretchedness.
  He shows that for those left
  behind what also gradually
  disappeared was their peace of
  mind, their self-respect and their
  ability to communicate what was
  happening or how they felt: an
  uncanny, insidious erosion of self. A
  whole nation relapsed into silence,

Peter Bradshaw’s fi lm of the week

Rojo

gpp

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