Countries and Movies: Argentina

The cinema of Argentina is presented in the Golden Thousand one film - the black comedy "Relatos salvajes (Wild Tales)". Director Damián Szifron.

In fairness, it should be noted that 10 film companies from 4 countries took part in creating the picture: 4 Argentinean, 4 Spanish, one British and one French. But, given that the director of the film, also the author of the script is Argentinian, the film was shot in Argentina, and the Argentinean contribution to the budget of the film was 70%, we considered it fair to consider this film as a work of Argentinean cinema. Although we are aware that at various film forums this film for tactical reasons was presented either as a European, or as a Latin American.

The film premiered at the Cannes International Film Festival on May 17, 2014. At this festival, Damián Szifron's movie was nominated for the Palme d'Or, but the festival’s jury, led by New Zealand filmmaker Jane Campion, opted for the Turkish film "Kis Uykusu (Winter Sleep)" directed by Nuri Bilge Ceylan. The company of “losers” to the Szifron's film was made up of 17 films, including “Leviathan” by Andrei Zvyagintsev, “Mommy” by Xavier Dolan.

A year later, the film "Wild Tales" received an Academy Award nomination for Best Foreign Language Film, but the American Film Academy deemed the Polish film "Ida" by Pawel Pawlikowski more worthy of this prize. Again the company of relative "losers" to the film of Damián Szifron was "Leviathan", as well as the Estonian film "Mandariinid (Tangerines)" by Zaza Urushadze.

In the same year of 2015, "Wild Tales" was nominated for the Italian David Di Donatello Prize. But this prize was awarded to the British film "The Theory of Everything" by James Marsh. But in 2016, the film of Damián Szifron was still awarded a very prestigious film award - the British BAFTA Award in the category Best Film in a Foreign Language.

As for the reviews of film critics, the vast majority of reviews were absolutely positive. For instance, Geoffrey Macnab: "Wild Tales is a raucously entertaining collection of "six deadly stories of revenge"....There is a lot of violence here, often staged in a manner so extreme and so comical that it verges on the cartoonish."

Or Manohla Dargis: "In between its shocker start and equally startling windup, this Argentine anthology offers up a scabrous, often unsettlingly funny look at human behavior in extremis."

Or Anton Dolin: “there is no doubt that every normal person will find something close to him in the film. And together we will find a brilliant director, whose name is now worth remembering: Damián Szifron."

One of the authors of Roger Ebert's website, Godfrey Cheshire, who rated the film with 4 out of four stars, described the film as a collection of short stories with a confident, coolly elegant visual style, which produces a synergistic effect of true artistic vision.

However, the film received a lot of sharply opposed reviews. For instance, Richard Brody: "Each of the segments involves violence and illustrates the arrogance of the wealthy and powerful, but their moralizing is as facile as the plotting is mechanical. ... Szifron’s brightly lit theatrics and simplistic attitudes seem borrowed from television commercials."

Or Anton Fomochkin: "The main vice of Szifron is bad taste, especially felt in the culmination of each episode ... Wildness goes to ridiculous extremes, vulgar, sometimes funny and unremarkable."

However, such a spread of diametrically opposing opinions is quite explainable. The genre of "black comedy" is very unusual for many, and for some, who believe that humor and blood are incompatible things, is simply unacceptable.

Nevertheless, the mass audience gave the film its assessment, both in terms of the dollar and the ratings. With a budget of $ 3.3 million, the box office of the picture amounted to almost $ 31 million. 73% of IMDB and Kinopoisk users gave this film a rating of 8 to 10.

Based on the foregoing, the rating of the film "Wild Tales" according to FilmGourmand was 8.728, which made the film 231st in the Golden Thousand.