Institute History
Description
Outside the mainstream of Argentine cinema, Alejandro Agresti pursues a singular and highly stylized vision of the alienated individual afloat in post-dictatorship Argentina, portrayed always in black and white.
Love is a Fat Woman opens with the scene of a Hollywood director making a fraudulent movie about Argentine misery, crassly reflective of every stereotype of Latin American poverty. Jose, the film’s journalist hero, stages his own intervention and is fired by his newspaper for his efforts. Increasingly marginalized, he wanders the melancholic streets of Buenos Aires in search of the woman, whose death he can’t admit, even as he can’t forget her absence, either. More a poet than a militant, he embarrasses his friends by his inability to adjust to normalization and his refusal to stop asking questions about the whereabouts of his “disappeared” girlfriend. The figures of the traditional tango bandoleon player, the blind man, the child, and the intellectual, all retract as if through a distortionist’s lens the improvised solutions of today’s Argentina.
Agresti has a particularly plastic command of the cinema,. participating in the shooting of the film as well as its scripting, and clearly in designing its black and white look to say as much about the recent history of cinema as of Argentina itself. Agresti arrived as an enfant terrible with his first film, El Hombre Que Gano la Rason , in 1986 at the age of 25.