The Film Critic

Buenos Aires film critic Victor Tellez (Rafael Spregelburd) is disillusioned with contemporary cinema, especially romantic comedies and their trite conventions and contrivances. Then he meets a mysterious woman (Dolores Fonzi) who buys an apartment he wants before he has a chance to make an offer. It's an instant antagonism that turns to romance, and suddenly Victor—who constantly watches Jean-Luc Godard's French New Wave classic Breathless, dreams in black and white, and offers a running internal monologue in French—is living out a real-life romantic comedy, complete with an enigmatic and free-spirited love interest, fireworks in the sky on the first kiss, coincidental meetings, slow-motion reveries, a bouncy montage sequence, and quotes from Amelie, Titanic, Jerry Maguire, and other films. Victor even starts using moments from the new romance as raw material for a script he's writing. This self-aware comedy from Argentina is not as clever as is could be and it slips quite happily into the very conventions it is supposedly spoofing. Sofia, the love interest, is little more than a romantic fantasy but Fonzi gives a spirited and lively performance as the woman who pulls dour divorced Victor out of his doldrums. Oddly enough, the film actually works better as an offbeat romantic comedy in its own right than as a satire on the genre. A strong optional purchase. (S. Axmaker)