‘Puan’ Review: The Personal Gets Political in a Sly, Delightful Argentinian Academia Comedy
29.09.2023 - 22:05
/ variety.com
Jessica Kiang Anyone familiar with the often disquieting solo work of directors María Alché and Benjamín Naishtat may be put on high uneasiness-alert by the opening scene of “Puan,” their first co-directed feature. Despite the jaunty pop song playing, an older man going for a morning jog in a scrubby Buenos Aires park, suddenly keels over dead of a heart attack.
Given the surreal griefscape of Alché’s “A Family Submerged” or the sinister tides of Naishtat’s superb “Rojo” (which won best director, actor and cinematography in San Sebastian in 2018), there’s every possibility that the music is a red herring, and the death portends what is to come. But perhaps that is “Puan”‘s first joke.
In fact, Alché and Naishtat seem to have found the experience of writing together in the captivity of lockdown a liberation of a looser, funnier storytelling mode. What transpires is a fleet-footed if sharply pointed existential-crisis comedy, shot with unobstrusive, naturalistic dynamism by Hélène Louvart, that finds wit and wisdom in the last place on earth one might expect to find either: a university philosophy department.
The university is known locally as Puan (named after its closest metro stop), where the dead jogger, Caselli, was the beloved, respected — if old-guard — head of the philosophy faculty. His passing leaves a professional vacuum, but also a personal void for fellow philosophy professor Marcelo Pena (Marcelo Subiotto) who was Caselli’s devoted student, then a confidante and a colleague, happy to adhere strictly to the classical syllabus Caselli developed.
But Marcelo, who is married to firebrand activist Vicky (Mara Bestelli) and has a young son, also has a tendency to withdraw from the limelight wherever possible. So
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