Netflix launches San Sebastián in Argentina

Special Envoy to San SebastiánPreceded on the calendar by two giants of the festival circuit like Toronto and Venice, the San Sebastian Film Festival must wield all possible weapons to remain relevant on the international scene. That's why, in 2017, while the major A-list festivals were considering what to do with Netflix, San Sebastian opened its doors to the platform and has ended up becoming one of its strategic allies, especially when it comes to premiering Latin American productions. This is the context that explains why a nice and fairly conventional Netflix comedy like 27 nights, directed by Uruguayan Daniel Hendler, opened the Basque festival this Friday, which had never offered such a place of honor to a film from a platform.

The choice of this Argentine production must also be interpreted as a tribute by the festival to a cinematography that is going through a very complicated moment due to Milei's arbitrary and brutal chainsaw cuts, which has left Argentine cinema, one of the most vital and creative in the American continent, practically paralyzed and without public funding. "This year, not a single film has been produced with support from the Argentine government," said the producer of 27 nights, Agustina Campbell–. The Argentine films scheduled this year in San Sebastián were financed before the arrival of Milei's government or are original productions from platforms." The outlook for next year is, therefore, very worrying.

As the film's other co-producer, Santiago Mitre –also director of'Argentina, 1985–, "that an Argentine film opens the festival is a sign of the importance that Argentine cinema has for the world." And that's true, although perhaps not thanks to works like 27 nights, in which Martha Hoffman, a rich and eccentric widow who spends her days between parties and happenings artistic, is committed to a psychiatric hospital by her daughters, who believe she will squander the family estate with her donations and dissolute lifestyle. The conflict is observed through the troubled eyes of the expert who must diagnose the woman's mental state, a rather pusillanimous man played with little conviction by Hendler himself, a long-time actor who, incidentally, has another film as a director at the festival. A loose end.

A true story

27 nights, which is inspired by the true story of the artist and writer Natalia Kohen, who was hospitalized at the age of 87 by her daughters (a subsequent trial showed that her faculties were intact), focuses its interest on the play of contrasts between the timid personality of the expert and the extravagant vitality of the widow (a lovely Mari) to get more humorous benefits. Despite the predictability of the plot and the lack of subtlety, the formula of the clash between opposite characters works, but the film falls flat when the flashbacks recreate Hoffman's time in the psychiatric hospital, that is, the 27 nights In any case, it's worth appreciating that a film so basic in its dramatic approach ultimately addresses the complexity of caring for an elderly and fragile person: neither locking them up in a psychiatric hospital nor leaving them completely to their own devices is usually the best solution.