In the intensely creative world of independent Argentine filmmaking, Gaston Solnicki holds a unique spot. A trained musician driven to never make the same movie twice, he has jumped from films about music composition and performance (Süden) to reformulating his own family’s home movies (Papirosen) to his latest, an astonishing leap into the strange world of teenagers adrift. Solnicki creates a mesmerizing string of set pieces inside stunning framings and brilliant color schemes held together by a soundtrack blasting with Bela Bartok’s electrifying opera, “Bluebeard’s Castle.” Kékszakállú (“Bluebeard” in Hungarian) isn’t about the notoriously bloodthirsty character, but about a growing feeling of dread that overwhelms a teen girl as she retreats from the world. An unforgettable experience.
Plays like a beautifully evocative and minimalist satire of [a] heavily class-based milieu.
- Carmen Gray, Senses of Cinema
Inviting and approachable, a pleasantly intuitive trip through changing times.
- Scott Tobias, Variety
A film whose every moment is the product of a nervous gamble, a young person’s search for a reason for being, and thus a beguiling mirror of its heroine’s journey.
- José Teodoro, Cinema Scope
It’s an eerie high-modernist fable of girls from a seemingly well-protected environment exiting their childhood castles for the wide world where pleasures lure and dangers lurk—and sometimes, merely a job needs to be found. Irony is the name of the game, but also a will for beauty that is extremely tactile, sensual, loosely woven—in that respect, at least, close to Bartók’s opera..
- Olaf Möller, Film Comment
Distinguished by a fantastically enterprising and expressive use of a diverse range of found locations. The latter vividly connote both the private anxiety and alienation experienced by the film’s protagonists and the pervasive malaise afflicting a highly unequal and divided national society still processing the convulsions of the extreme financial crisis undergone at the new millennium’s outset.
- Jonathan Murray, Cineaste
(Available to download after screening date)