Review of Whisky
There aren’t too many Uruguayan films featured on Twitch, but Whisky is not a conventional South American picture anyway; instead it embodies the style that Taxi Driver writer Paul Schrader termed Transcendental. This is where a sparse aesthetic and a mundane narrative builds tension that finally gives way to life-affirming decisive action and miraculous change. The style, which Schrader believes escapes cultural locality, has been found in the films of Bresson, Dreyer and Tarkovsky and, much to the delight no-doubt of Twitch’s preponderance of Asian cinema aficionados, Yasujiro Ozu. Unlike these men, however, Whisky directors Juan Pablo Rebella and Pablo Stoll also employ scant visual techniques in a bid to make us laugh. Whisky may well be the very first Transcendental comedy!
Disgruntled misanthrope Jacabo Koller operates a shambling little sock-factory in Montevideo, employing two young seamstresses and a personal assistant, the taciturn and middle-aged Marta, who dotes upon and organises the life of her wretched superior.
The film’s first shots are concerned with Jacabo’s drive to work, and follow him throughout his day. The sequence draws our attention to the fact that the camera only ever moves when it’s mounted to a car; movement, spiritually and physically, occurs only through windscreens – and through the lens of a movie camera. All the other shots in the film are static: they are still-lifes, focused on filthy, cracked, graffiti-strewn walls; hideous, obsolete machinery; and half-eaten food. They are still-lifes of characters, moving nowhere, who have reduced themselves to objects as neglected and unloved as those in their surroundings. It could almost be said that the characters enter into silent dialogue with the sets, detailing otherwise imperceptible distinctions between the days. The everyday sequence plays itself over pretty much verbatim three times in the first act – phrases are repeated, the same machines produce the same dull whir and the same lights flicker and strive for life. The only notable change is the date displayed in Jacabo’s office.
Despite the unappealing, sparse nature of the mise-en-scene, the shots are beautifully constructed so as to convey the loneliness and inertia of the protagonists. To the intense hum of a Santaolalla-like soundtrack, we witness Jacabo eating alone, confronted by the empty seat in front of him, which, in its parallel association to other chairs within the room, opens up the gulf of emptiness before him; his head remains down. The image is shot from outside, the restaurant’s window reflecting the nightlife and bustle of Montevideo from which Jacabo has excluded himself.
It is a year since Jacabo’s world last changed; his mother died, and now it is finally time to bury her. This is complicated by the impending arrival of his brother Herman. Married with children, Herman is an inveterate traveller and a successful sock manufacturer in Brazil. In a bid to appear worthwhile, Jacabo convinces Marta to pose as his loving wife for the duration of Herman’s stay. She wears his mother’s wedding ring and poses for a photograph. This picture is the movie’s conceit: “whisky” is the word used by Uruguayan photographers to coax smiles out of their subjects. Little gives a more mendacious portrait of reality than the “cheese” imbued, contrived grins we find on a snapshot. It is these that Jacabo offers his brother, and that we too so frequently offer as counterfeit mementos of past happiness – lies on film. Once the picture is taken, Jacabo’s countenance creases once again into desolation and disappointment.
Herman’s arrival does little to lift Jacabo’s mood; indeed, as he becomes increasingly dour and irascible, the viewer, attuned now to the subtlest of visual modifications and edits, will laugh heartily at the smallest thing. Herman plucks a magnet, in the shape of a Roger Ebert “thumbs-up” from the fridge and tells Jacabo of his plan to use them to publicise his business. Wearing a snarl, Jacabo subconsciously replaces the magnet in the thumbs-down position. In the same scene, it is tacit dialogue between people and objects, rather than conversations and witty remarks between human interlocutors, that produces humour. Having been awakened by drilling early in the morning, Marta comes down to breakfast. Cut to Jacabo, his breakfast and drill sharing the same table; cut to the wall and a gaping hole; cut to Marta’s discreet, non-judgemental, saintly face.
Although Marta is captivated by the charming sibling, Jacabo becomes ever more frustrated by his brother’s suggestions as to how he could renovate his antiquated business. As it is, Herman succeeds in whisking the pair off on vacation, much to Jacabo’s ire. Nevertheless it is a respite from the present and a voyage into the past for the Kollers, who visited the kitsch seaside resort – replete with karaoke, an ice rink and amusement arcades – as children. At this point Jacabo seems divided by mounting depression, nostalgia, and even the desire for fun; playing air hockey with Herman appears to re-ignite something of his lost childhood innocence. For Marta though, the rarity of movement in space, and the warmth and interest in her shown by Herman, forces her to look to the future. When Jacabo wins a camera in one of those impossible coin-op claw games, it is again time to say “whisky”. On one level this would appear to represent the fallacy of holidays – an enforced banking up of pleasures fit for staving off the poverty of a hard-working humdrum existence; the snapshot providing us with respite, a hollow placebo, keeping us content between vacations. One feels, however, that Marta and Herman may not be feigning their smiles on this occasion.
The conclusion to Whisky, a result of decisive action from all three characters, contains two miracles – for as I said, this is a film in the Transcendental style, and just the smallest deviation from mundanity is enough to make tears well up in the eyes. Humour, however, is the most potent palliative of human tragedy, and Whisky is funny enough to allow for an ending that is only partially happy; in some ways it is terribly sad. Being a Latin film, there is also an encoded political allegory here as well; it is fitting that it is predicated on the relationship between two factory owners and a worker. Whisky allows itself to comment on the effect of regressive working practices and social conditions as much as it does the philosophical issues of free will and the living of a regressive life; as much as it also comments upon the lies of the camera, and the lies with which we continue to delude ourselves into thinking we are happy. The film moves only with Herman, the joyful explorer. Like the beating of a heart, it is only movement that engenders life in individuals and societies; that divides us from the inanimate, often neglected accoutrements of existence that we ourselves placed there for our benefit.
As delicate, understated and unassuming as it is, Whisky is nonetheless a powerful, moving parable about the importance of our responsibilities to one another and to our own lives.
