Gustavo Fontán’s award-winning El rostro pushes the boundaries of film language
“Can there be a somewhat innocent gaze, as though we looked at the world for the first time? Can a shot, in that innocence, film a dog, a boat, a body, a face, with a simple and raw expression? Can joy exist in this simple encounter with the world?”, wonders Argentine filmmaker Gustavo Fontán (El árbol, La orilla que se abisma, La casa) about his new work El rostro (The Face), for which he won the Best Director Award at this year’s Argentine competition of the BAFICI. A very well deserved prize for an artist who has consistently and successfully pushed the boundaries of film language in order to come up with an enticing, warm poetry of his own.
In his new opus, what you first see is a man arriving on a boat to an island on the Paraná River in the province of Entre Ríos. He goes to a certain place, where it seems there once was some kind of a house (or a home). But there’s nothing left now. At a closer look, we can see traces of something old and forever lost, perhaps his birth place. It appears that the presence of the man makes some things become visible: animals and canoes, ranches and tables. You can feel a space is being re-constructed. Soon, others arrive: a woman, a father, a few kids, and some friends. A face. More faces. Some kind of party is underway now.
You could say it’s a long-awaited reencounter between the man who came on the boat and his loved ones, who were waiting for him to come back to life. Now nature and the people who inhabit it reveal themselves in their full splendour. The filmmaker casts a serene gaze on the passing of time, the imminence (or not) of death, and the nature of memories.
El rostro is, above all, the type of experience where we immerse ourselves into a cinematic universe that somehow resembles the one we live in, and yet at the same time it’s altogether different in the ways it feels, looks, and sounds. It’s also a meditation on the emotional and evocative power of images that may first present themselves with a certain degree of literalness, but then largely transcend said literalness and become something else as unforeseen nuances take centre stage. Let’s say that life (or reality) is re-examined, time and again, with new eyes.
Shot in grainy black and white 16mm and Super 8mm, with a multilayered sound design, and at very leisured pace, Fontán’s award-winning work is to be apprehended by your senses, never by your intellect (take the impressive textures, shapes and shades). In any case, free association is always welcome as long as it doesn’t shut down its many possible meanings.
The fact that El rostro is a non-narrative feature, which instead works within the realm of the cinema of poetry, doesn’t prevent viewers from building their own story — or stories. For Fontán, cinema has to leave some room, areas of exploration if you will, for viewers to recognize and discover themselves so they are free to think their world all over once again. Most importantly: with an innocent gaze.
