Antonioni-esque forest ramble is haunting, but has too many endings

It's become impossible now to watch a film about you people wandering out in the wild without having Loneliest Planet premonition: what kind of portentous non-event is going to come along to change everything? So when we watch director Jazmin López's film about five young people, three boys and two girls, taking a meandering, poetic walk through an Argentinian forest, listening to them make up meaningfully nonsensical haiku-like six-word (or five, or seven) phrases, teasing each other, kissing, fussing over a tape recorder, fiddling with a map, we just know something's going to come along and turn things topsy-turvy. Sure enough it comes -- and comes -- and comes again. López has unfortunately chosen to tack her outtakes and alternative endings onto her short film, making it 80 minutes long. With a more pointed script and better editing, she had material for a pretty haunting 60 minutes here. There's a lot of stuff after what ought to have been the ending that would be better as bonus material on the DVD. Julia Loktov's laurels are safe. But that ending -- the one that ends nearly twenty minutes before the film does -- is mysterious, mind-bending, powerful stuff. So there is a lot of promise here, if it doesn't just turn out to be pretension and confusion. I hope not.

López is giving us sophisticated material, and her five middle class urban young people, who came in a BMW, play sly, allusive games with each other, and with us. First we have to guess relationships. Two are a loving couple. Another two, maybe. The odd boy out may be gay (in a tacked-on sequence he says so). They are looking for a house. But they seem curiously indifferent to which way they're going and what guidelines they should follow. That cassette tape someone plays: it has a Bach keyboard concerto, and their voices, in the car apparently, talking about how they'll find their destination. Maybe there's a key to everything in this tape. The haiku game shows they're familiar companions, all five of them. In their casual idleness, their lack of direction the hint that one of them may be about to disappear, one is reminded of Antonioni's classic, L'Avventura. The mimed volleyball game might remind you of the great Italian's Blow-Up.

The menace is constant, but dreamlike. There is a pistol. Is it loaded or not? It seems it is. But the rule of postmodern storytellers seems to be that a pistol once introduced need not be used, as before, only toyed with. They go swimming, and there are underwater shots, and we can't help being afraid someone will vanish in the water. They find the house, and you will be surprised at what happens then. By that stage the mood has shifted imperceptibly but irrevocably from dream to nightmare.

The more I think about it the more this seems like great stuff -- but in potential, more than the final product. If only so much of the early sequences didn't seem aimless and repetitive, and if only there weren't all those confused alternate endings. The 28-year-old Jazmín López is better known as a visual artist and has shown video installations. If she is serious about feature filmmaking, she might be a talent to watch. That remains to be seen. The learned Richard Scheib, who watched this film at Vancouver, has pointed out that the "deathdream" (into which this film arguably fits) is a device that has been considered "tired and hackneyed" of late, though he thinks the arthouse and festival crowd is "blissfully unaware" of this. But of course in the right hands "tired and hackneyed" tropes can always be brought back to life.

Leones ("Lions"), 80 mins., debuted in the Orizzonti section at Venice 2012. In 2013 it has been shown at Rotterdam and Creteuil. Screened for this review as part of the MoMA-Film Society of Lincoln Center series New Directors/New Films, March 2013.

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.