THE WINDOW
Directed by Carlos Sorín
Written by Sorín & Pedro Mairal
Released by Film Movement
Spanish with English subtitles
Argentina/Spain. 85 min. Not Rated
With Antonio Larreta, María del Carmen Jiménez, Emilse Roldán, Arturo Goetz, Jorge Diez, Carla Peterson, Luis Luque & Roberto Rovira
 

Argentinean director Carlos Sorín (Intimate Stories) cites Ingmar Bergman as a major influence on The Window. In particular, he describes his first viewing of Wild Strawberries (1957), Bergman’s film about an elderly professor who reflects upon his life choices and struggles to validate his existence. “This movie was a transition in my life as spectator,” Sorín explains. “From then on, I progressively started getting interested in a different cinema, the cinema ‘for adults’.”  
 
What he’s saying is that Bergman was “serious.” Thomas Pynchon once wrote: “When we speak of ‘seriousness’ in fiction, ultimately we are talking about an attitude toward death.” Few directors were more death-obsessed than Bergman, and what undoubtedly fascinated Sorín was Bergman’s unabashed willingness to take on death as a theme. The Window certainly shares traits with Wild Strawberries. Both feature a man near death haunted by memories of the past, and both include sequences of the protagonist wandering among picturesque open spaces. Like Bergman, Sorín is fascinated by the human face and spares no opportunity for an expressive close-up.  
 
What’s missing, however, is Bergman’s portentousness, his cold, brooding insistence on doomsdaying. It’s no surprise that Sorín was drawn to Wild Strawberries—one of Bergman’s least pessimistic films—because there is more humor and all-around warm fuzziness in The Window than Bergman could ever muster. Sorín is fascinated by Bergman’s death-obsession, but in a life-affirming kind of way. 
 
You could glean that just from the opening credits, during which a lush waltz scored for pizzicato strings, bassoon, and English horn floods the soundtrack. In the remote countryside, bedridden 80-year-old Antonio (played by noted Uruguayan writer Antonio Larreta) lives alone, except for a host of servants. His loneliness is represented Bergman-style by the initially oppressive ticking of two clocks. But as Sorín lingers on the clocks, we hear that the ticks’ intervals are slightly out of sync with one another, producing a hypnotic rhythmic motif; the oppressive becomes playful. 
 
Antonio eagerly anticipates a visit from his estranged son (Jorge Diez), a renowned pianist. He wants everything to be perfect, so he has a piano tuner (Alberto Ledesma) come to examine the downstairs upright, which hasn’t been played in some time. (The piano, incidentally, provides some delicious sonic interludes, much like last year’s The Silence Before Bach by Catalan filmmaker Pere Portabella. Audiophiles rejoice!) While at work, the piano tuner—a jovial, hirsute middle-aged man—flirts with one of Antonio’s servants and expounds upon the virtues of rural life. He also unwittingly serves as Antonio’s accomplice in defying doctor’s orders when he allows Antonio to leave the house and wander willy-nilly about the Pampas. This results in some expertly composed panoramic shots that not only convey the beauty of Antonio’s surroundings, but also give an external, man-dwarfed-by-nature manifestation to Antonio’s struggle with mortality.  
 
There's a palpable sadness to these images, and Sorín doesn't deny that spending late life in such isolation has its tragic dimensions. But Sorín also can’t resist injecting his zest for life. Sure, the sight of an octogenarian wandering about nature, IV bag still in hand, is pretty heartbreaking. But its sheer absurdity is also endearing, even inspiring. If this were Bergman, Antonio’s efforts would be a pitifully futile protest against death’s (or, since this is Bergman, Death’s) inevitability. For Sorín, however, Antonio maintains his dignity and stakes claim to what little life he has left.
 
It’s to the director’s credit that he can treat death with necessary gravity, and yet, at the same time, deftly weave in such effervescence, such unsentimental humanity. By the time his son arrives, we hope Antonio will have achieved some kind of peace. What happens may surprise you. Rich Zwelling
May 6, 2009