Extrano

The strengths don’t quite outweigh the weaknesses of Santiago Loza’s first feature as writer-director. The story centres on middle-aged Axel, Julio Chávez ’s unsmiling central protagonist, a man with an intense facial impassivity and inclination towards pensive longueurs. Only when he instigates a flowering love affair with a young pregnant woman named Erika (Valeria Bertucceli) does his desire to exist in a state of perpetual adolescence reveal itself, shaping the film into a hushed mid-life crisis yarn about the wares that come with growing old. Cinematographer Willi Behnisch shrouds Buenos Aires in a cloak of relative anonymity, with glum, overcast skies and sparse surroundings used to represent each character’s hidden loneliness. It’s subtle to the point where nothing much happens, then casually arrives at an unsatisfying ending. A flawed first experiment, but there’s still enough promise here to keep an eye on director Loza.