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Otra vuelta (2003)
Santiago Paravecino
Argentina

This feature length black and white film is a slow moving, contemplative attempt at neo-symbolism. I say attempt, it is more like a nine tenths succesful film. It was billed as director's first (feature length?) but apparently it was not his first film.

This is a thinly veiled meta-referential piece whose name: "otra vuelta" can be read on multiple levels. On a first level, it refers to the return to the director (cleverly renamed with the same initials) to his hometown of Chacabuco. On a second level, it refers to his addressing the making of a film based on a story by Haroldo Conti, (also of Chacabuco and dissappeared, it would seem, in 1976) called "La noche perfumada" whose validity as subject matter is questioned throughout the film by the protagonists various interlocutors. Curiously "Los perfumes de la noche" was a medio-metraje (mid-length film) made in 2002 based on a play by the very same Haroldo Conti and adapted by Santiago Paravecino. In this way the second time around is the return to the subject matter of his previous film. On a third level it can be read as Paravecino's (or his incarnate film double's) following the geographical path of the author Conti, home. And lastly it can be read in the echoing parallels between the story of "La noche perfumada" and the end of the life of his friend who recently committed suicide.

Visually stunning, there is a relatively strong rope of intertwined stories reducing memories to the plane of the ephemeral, reducing art to shreds that explode in the night, but perhaps a few too many loose threads for the film to realize its maximum potential.

Cites the left-behind lover of the recently deceased: "At the end, after it is all over, there are no more images left, only words... or was it the other way around?"