The latest from Argentine film collective El Pampero Cine (La Flor, Trenque Lauquen), Pin de Fartie interprets Samuel Beckett's one act absurdist, existentialist play Fin de Partie (Endgame), originally written in French and later translated in English.
Not only do director Alejo Moguillansky and the co-writers play with the letters in the title, they play with the form and structure, telling related stories within a story in an inventive and playful way. It’s a film anagram version of the play.
It starts with an aging blind man, Otto (Santiago Gobernori) and his young servant girl, Cleo (Cleo Moguillansky, daughter of director Alejo), at the picturesque lakeside (shot in Lake Lake Léman, Switzerland). We do not know how they got there or the exact nature of their relationship.
They banter and repeat endlessly about petty things, while the sound of loud planes flying by interrupt their verbal exchanges from time to time. There is or was a war and the world is in ruins and they are isolated; we gather all that from their exchanges. They are stuck together, whether they like it or not, a bond that they have a love/hate relationship with.
Early on, it is revealed that through sound foley artists at work, many of the sounds you hear are created by foley sessions, as well as narration by actors in a studio setting, accentuating the meta aspect of the whole production.
There are two actors (Marcos Ferrante and Laura Paredes of Trenque Lauquen) rehearsing Beckett's play. They have a set routine: He takes subways and she a taxi, they fumble their keys to the hotel room and they go over the play. Their rendez-vous is always at night in a non-descript hotel. Is this for a play that would be staged at a later date or is this some kind of arrangement between two lovers? If it's not for a stage production, who are the targeted audiences?
Then there's an aging pianist mother and her son. The son helps his mother to perform Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata and then listens. This arrangement also has a feeling of eternity; whether forced upon them or not, it feels without an end date. One day, the mother gives the son the Becket play and they start reading the lines from it back and forth. On another day, the son realises that their relationship mirrors that of the play they are reading.
These intersecting stories, playfully jumping from one to another and back, all contemplate the existential dread of being trapped and prolonging the inevitable while enjoying each other's company. It's a choreographed verbal dance move of farewells between two people.
Playful and joyous, in spite of the play it is based on, which examines dissatisfaction, pain and meaninglessness, Pin de Fartie is yet another little experiment in narrative storytelling that constantly challenges the norm and form of traditional cinema from El Pampero Cine.
Pin de Fartie plays this weekend as part of the New York Film Festival. .
Dustin Chang is a freelance writer. His musings and opnions on everything cinema and beyond can be found at www.dustinchang.com