Caracas

A middle-aged man shows money to a young man gets followed home asks him to partially denude himself and his back while he sits in an armchair at a distance, without touching him.He is Armando, a man in his 50s,who runs a dental prosthesis laboratory. He lures young boys, offers them money and always repeats the same ritual. He lives alone, has a sister and a score to settle with his father. Armando's experience is repetitive bordering on paranoia. An encounter with Elder, a young delinquent lured on the street, radically changes the situation. The first homophobic, traumatic, and violent approach will lead him to continue searching for the boy until an unexpected intimacy is triggered. Elder has his father in prison, a man who used to beat him and who killed one of his friends. The father figure, for both of them, will affect their relationship is will reverse roles until they commit an extreme act that will affect their lives forever.

Lorenzo Vigas was certainly inspired by the cinema of Pablo Larrain so much so that he adopted as the protagonist of his film, the sublime Alfredo Castro. The first shot from the back reminds us of the unforgettable Tony Manero.

The final twist unequivocally suggests that it is not sex that one wants to talk about but emotional needs, pasts that can trigger psychopathological behavior.

Armando has no wife, no children, no friends; he is shy.

Lorenzo Vigas, reveals almost nothing about this man, except for a few clues that will be definitively revealed only in the last scene of the film.

And nothing will be as it seemed, even the role of prey and predator will take on other guises.

Melancholy, poverty, lives on the margins in a chaotic and impersonal Caracas from which the talented young Luis Silva hails.

The title highlights the theme of distance. Armando longs, looks but does not touch, waits.

What is desire? What if it is fulfilled? What does the person who cancels it out by finally fulfilling it commit?

Is there a right distance, a physiological distance that cannot and should not be bridged?

What reaction can love elicit in those who have never received it?

Golden Lion at the 72nd Venice Film Festival

Violence wins, alienation, madness, impetus, senselessness.

It wins vehemence over self-referential form.

Wins the roar that engulfs the starlets of critics emblazoned and enchanted by self-celebrating films, now far from the ability to be disquieted by a cinema other, different, strong, instinctive, annoying, indispensable and intrusive.

Aristotle wins, who in the Poetics taught the rules of a good tale: a plot, a plot, an unraveling and focal point the metabolé, that is, a reversal.

Rules perfectly applied in Lorenzo Vigas' film Desde Allà.

The eyes of those who are not afraid to shatter and see win because "there is no more beauty and comfort except in the gaze that stares at horror, stands up to it, and, in the irreducible consciousness of negativity, considers the possibility of the best," as Adorno said.

The art of those who know how to get out of the protected enclosure of reason and use their madness as a tool to grasp the irrational background that constitutes us wins; that art that represents laceration, splitting, risk.

An intense, strong, indelible film.

27-Jun-2023 by Beatrice