Luis Puenzo Movies
Argentine filmmaker Luis Puenzo is best known internationally for making The Official Story (1985), a provocative portrait of a middle-class woman who gradually realizes that by remaining complacent in the face of social injustice she is as guilty as the government she derides. The film earned an Academy award for Best Foreign Film the following year and was nominated for Best Screenplay. A former director of television commercials, Puenzo made his feature-film directorial debut in 1973 with Lights of My Shoes. Most of Puenzo's films offer probing, metaphorical portraits of characters and relationships in the face of larger sociopolitical issues. ~ Sandra Brennan, Rovi
Writer-director Lucía Puenzo follows up her feature debut, the festival favorite XXY, with The Fish Child, a romantic crime drama adapted from her novel of the same name. Lala (Inés Efron, who also starred in XXY) is an Argentinean girl from a wealthy family. She's desperately in love with the family's young live-in maid, La Guayi (singer Mariela Vitale, making her feature-film debut), and she's jealous of La Guayi's many other admirers. When Lala's politically active father, Bronté (Pep Munné), dies under mysterious circumstances, she runs off to La Guayi's remote hometown in Paraguay, hoping that her lover will follow. There, she uncovers the truth about La Guayi's sordid past, and the maid's troubled relationship with her own father, a telenovela star named Sócrates (real-life Paraguayan soap star Arnaldo André). Lala also explores the local legend of "The Fish Child." Meanwhile, La Guayi is imprisoned for her suspected involvement in Bronté's death, and when Lala finds out, she jeopardizes her own freedom by returning home. In Puenzo's novel, written when she was just 23 years old, the story is told from the point-of-view of Lala's family dog. The film features an appearance by the Paraguayan musical group the Potrankos. The Fish Child had its North American premiere at the 2009 Tribeca Film Festival, where it was shown in the World Narrative Competition. ~ Josh Ralske, Rovi
- Starring:
- Inés Efron, Mariela Vitale, (more)
Lucia Puenzo's drama XXY probes the psychological aftereffects that adolescent transsexuality can yield. With a name easily applicable to either gender, young teenager Alex's (Ines Efron) hermaphroditic physiology causes a massive identity crisis and severe emotional withdrawal. The problems create social problems in the family's home of Argentina and virtually force Alex and his/her sympathetic parents, Kraken (Ricardo Darín) and Suli (Valeria Bertuchelli) to move to nearby Uruguay, at a point when Alex wrestles with the throes of puberty. The situation grows increasingly complex when several friends of the family arrive: marrieds Erika (Carolina Pelereti) and Ramiro (German Palacios), a plastic surgeon, and their adolescent son, Alvaro (Martin Piroyanski), whom Alex instantly propositions for sex. As Alex battles some local punks who try unsuccessfully to rape him/her (saved at the last minute by Kraken), Alvaro finally accepts Alex's promptings for intercourse and comes to a gradual realization of his own gayness. Meanwhile, the rift between the adults and the youth widens with increasing rapidity. ~ Nathan Southern, Rovi
- Starring:
- Ricardo Darín, Ines Flores, (more)
- 1992
- R
Released directly on to video in the U.S., but exhibited on the festival circuit and in Europe, Plague is an adaptation of Albert Camus' novel and reteams filmmaker Luis Puenzo with actors Robert Duvall and William Hurt to tell the story of a South American city that must be cut off from the world following an outbreak of the bubonic plague. The key characters include a French tele-journalist, her cameraman and a fearless doctor. ~ Sandra Brennan, Rovi
- Starring:
- William Hurt, Sandrine Bonnaire, (more)
In this historical drama based on Carlos Fuentes' novel, Harriet Winslow (Jane Fonda) is a naive woman who, hoping to broaden her horizons, accepts a job as a governess in Mexico in 1913. However, Harriet unknowingly finds herself thrown into the middle of the Mexican revolution, where she attracts the attentions of two very different men: an elderly American gentleman (Gregory Peck) who has come to Mexico to die, and Tomas Arroyo (Jimmy Smits), a general with Pancho Villa's army of rebels who is fighting for the freedom of his people. The American's attraction to Harriet is more intellectual (though he unmistakably finds her attractive), while Arroyo holds a greater romantic allure to Harriet, who is still a stranger to the ways of love. In time, she gains a new sense of freedom and self-knowledge in Mexico, but while the victories of Villa's forces bring out an unseemly arrogance in Arroyo, Harriet makes a surprising discovery about the Old Gringo -- that he is in fact the fabled author Ambrose Bierce, who vanished years before. Old Gringo was the first American film for director Luis Puenzo, and the next-to-last for star Jane Fonda. ~ Mark Deming, Rovi
- Starring:
- Jane Fonda, Gregory Peck, (more)
This is an emotionally gripping, fictional look at a couple torn apart by the infamous Argentine campaign of killings and torture that sent thousands of accused terrorists to unmarked graves in the mid-and late-'70s. Alicia (Norma Aleandro) and Roberto (Hector Alterio) adopted a little girl (Analia Castro) during this period of governmental terror in Argentina. Alicia has always wondered about the parents of their little girl, a topic her husband has forced her into forgetting as a condition of the adoption -- he alone knows the full story. Thanks to censorship, Alicia -- like others -- is not fully aware of how much killing has gone on until her students at school start complaining that their textbook histories were written by murderers. Add to this a long conversation with a friend who had been in exile after she was tortured by the government, and Alicia starts to do some serious political and personal research on her own. The results reveal the identity of the little girl's dead parents and reveal that Alicia's husband has had a nasty hand in the government repression and dirty dealings with foreign businesses. She also learns the identity of the girl's grandmother. Her next decision will determine what to do with this information. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, Rovi
- Starring:
- Héctor Alterio, Norma Aleandro, (more)
