17/05/2005

Danger, look out ! With Orlando Vargas, his first feature, screened in the Critics week International Critics week, the Uruguayan director Juan Pittaluga managed to captivate both the public and the critics. Carried single-handedly by Aurélien Recoing (L’Emploi du Temps) who plays Orlando Vargas with a depth that pervades the screen, the film never explains the nature of the threats hanging over the principal character and by extension his family. Starting out in Montevideo, the tale unfolds among the privileged classes in the Uruguayan capital and tells of the expatriate Vargas (banker, business man and top civil-servant) who refuses to sign a document, thereby blocking a system (no doubt corrupt) which has been operating for years. Discreet pressure is applied at functions in the grand hotels and a dull anxiety is drowned by Vargas in a mineral silence and in alcohol, watched anxiously by his wife (the Romanian actress Elina Löwensohn) and his young son. Constantly under surveillance, Vargas decides to take a break in the town of Joséfina, the last coastal village before the Brazilian border. After a long and dangerous car trip (with “vicious tolls” on the night’s journey), the family moves into a villa; Vargas goes for a drink in a bar and vanishes. His body is found several days later. Suicide, assassination, accidental drowning? The mystery of Orlando Vargas remains indecipherable even though we notice that Juan Pittaluga dedicated the film to his father, a diplomat relieved of his responsibilities by the dictatorship in 1973. Filmed with very little money, Orlando Vargas possesses an insidious charm, oscillating between a political thriller and the psychological drama of a family within which the unsaid things rule, and all this seasoned by the savage landscape, very cinematographic territory until now unseen on the big screen.

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A French production, since the filmmaker (associate producer, head of sound and the second camera by Jonathan Nossiter Mondovino) all live in France, Orlando Vargas was produced by Gémini Films and co-produced by Laroux-Ciné (Uruguay) and Les Films du Rat (France). With a budget of 1,21 million euros, it benefited from 470 000 euros from CNC Advance on Receipts before principal photography. Sold internationally by Gémini, it reaches French screens on June 22nd.

(Translated from French)