From Argentina, director Sebastián Borensztein lays out a glossy old-fashioned soaper of a type rarely seen outside of tele-novelas these days. None the worse for it, too, though they miss too many ready-to-go melodramatic opportunities.* Handsome Joaquin Furriel (one of those lucky actors who can pass for 25 to 55) is the proud papa whose wealthy lifestyle is a facade for crippling debt owed to friends, relatives & threatening loan sharks. It’ll take a financial miracle to save him! Instead, he gets a lifeline from a real life tragedy, the 1994 Buenos Aires bombing of an Israeli Community Center. (Kinda tasteless for use as a story trigger, no? Especially when the family is Jewish, and the film opens with a Bat Mitzvah the guy can’t afford.) But when the smoke clears, Furriel is unaccounted for, listed as missing, presumed dead. Debts cancelled, he’s secretly off to start a new life in Paraguay. Then, 15 years later, the internet opens his eyes to his old family now and he’s compelled to return incognito hoping to reveal his true identity to the beloved family he saved from financial ruin by disappearing. Fun! Of course, we know how these things must end: a sacrifice to save the people he’s never stopped loving. Or, if not that, having his grown son, unaware the ‘dangerous’ man following his family is actually his long lost father! Unbeknownst to him, he’s shot his own Papa and is now being forgiven & blessed by the dying man. What, no amnesia? Alas, neither scenario gets followed. That’s okay, instead we get Furriel showing the passage of 15 years by suddenly looking like Al Pacino as Silas Marner.
SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: * If you do this sort of thing, you can’t be ashamed to get a little dirty.
DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: *Back in 'Golden Age' Hollywood, when they still shot everything on soundstages & in b&w (unintentionally making it all slightly abstract & stylized), they knew how to get the most out of these things. Let Ronald Colman & Co. show you how with RANDOM HARVEST/’42. (And no skimping on the amnesia.) https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2018/09/random-harvest-1942.html
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