Editor’s Note
This week’s newsletter, written by Carlos Aguilar, explores the sometimes complex power dynamics between parents and children and the darker side of masculinity. His theatrical recommendation, Chile’s Oscar entry “The Meltdown,” follows an eight-year-old girl who witnesses the questionable choices adults make when money and power are at stake. For his streaming pick, Argentina’s “Horseplay” turns a weekend among male friends into an increasingly unsettling look at machismo, homophobia, and the boundaries men cross in the name of camaraderie. Plus, Carlos reviews Dominican filmmaker José María Cabral’s “Tiguere,” a coming-of-age drama about a teenage boy sent to a camp designed to mold boys into idealized men, and the rebellion that threatens to unravel his father’s carefully constructed world.
Happy Watching,
— Vanessa
What To Watch at Home & In Theaters
Image courtesy of Kino Lorber
EL DESHIELO (THE MELTDOWN)
Through the eyes of eight-year-old Inés (Maya O’Rourke), a girl who lives in her family’s mountain hotel, Chilean filmmaker Manuela Martelli (“Chile ’76”) builds a narrative that confronts Latin America’s relationship with Europe (one marked by a perceived power imbalance). Set amid snowy landscapes, the film follows Inés’ friendship with a German girl training to become a professional skier, and the events that unfold after the European girl disappears. As the search begins, Inés' family must save face as Spanish investors eye the land for a new resort. Inés bears witness to the adults’ unsavory choices. “The Meltdown” is Chile’s Oscar entry for Best International Feature Film.
Image courtesy of Dark Star Pictures
LOS AGITADORES (HORSEPLAY)
Argentina’s preeminent purveyor of homoerotic images, Marco Berger tackles the toxic groupthink of a group of male friends spending a weekend on a luxurious property. Their banter starts off crude but ordinary. Situations soon escalate from idiotic hazing and brute playfulness into the realm of the explicitly sexual, with boundaries being crossed under the guise of guys being guys. Berger mines the ensemble cast’s performances, most of them in various states of undress, for a story told in a single location about what’s permissible among men when machismo and homophobia are collective ills.
In “Tiguere,” a Father’s Lessons in Manhood Turn Ugly
Image courtesy of Pragda
Alberto (Manny Perez) embodies the idealized picture of manhood in Dominican society—or at least he thinks he does. Bearded and rugged, Alberto straddles the swag of a man who can stand his ground in a street fight while being materially successful enough to earn admiration from the upper echelons. Believing himself a paragon of masculinity, it’s not surprising that he hosts a camp for teenage boys with the promise that he’ll transform them from soft and fearful specimens into virile “tigueres.”
A “tiguere,” as prolific director José María Cabral (“Woodpeckers”) explains via on-screen text, is an archetype of manliness that today’s online “manosphere” might equate with an alpha man, and in many ways that assumption is correct. In the Dominican context, however, the term seems to carry a slyness, as if describing someone who gets his way by any means, even if his methods are neither admirable nor ethical.
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