Ciudad del sol (2003) User Reviews

Yet Another Film about "The Disappeared"- One you should miss!

[gonz30 · 5/10 · 23 December 2004]

Films about the "desaparecidos" - the thousands who disappeared during the Argentine military government have become a major sub group of the country's national cinema history. Many of them have been good. One of the first ones won the 1985 Foreign Film Oscar.

This film, however, is among the most boring and unwatchable of the group, if not THE most to date. Even an impressive cast, the screen writer (known for her TV work) and director could not make a decent "desaparecidos" movie. Forget the fact that the genre has become overworked and tiresome, this flick is simply a yawner.

It is no accident that this film was ripped apart, if not dismissed and unnoticed, by Argentine critics and moviegoers. I just saw it on Latin HBO by chance, unaware of its reviews or box office failure. I only found out above these facts through links on this site, by the way.

I knew I couldn't be alone, if I was unable to view this film in its entirety, on a rainy afternoon, on the 3rd day in a row of rain while on a beach vacation. I rarely dismiss a film totally, and make very negative comments about it. This one deserves them. Skip it.

City of darkness

[jotix100 · 6/10 · 20 September 2006]

The political turmoil in Argentina during the 1970s is at the center of this movie. That nefarious period that took the lives of many of the country's young people, is examined in the film. For people unfamiliar with what went on, the film presents a serious problem, as it tends to disorient us, even when we have a notion about what really happened in the country. Like other movies that have dealt with the subject, the political background is hard to follow as it tackles the story of a group of friends that lived during that period.

Manuela, a young woman at the center of the story, is shocked when she discovers her mother, Dalma, who has committed suicide. Manuela wants to understand her mother's past and sets out to investigate. Her whole world has crumbled. When the mysterious Luis Formosa keeps leaving her messages about how he wants to meet Dalma. Everything is pointing to a direction that turned out to confirm our suspicions: Luis Formosa and Manuela have more in common than really meets the eye.

The problem with this film, directed by Carlos Galettini, is that it doesn't have focus. The screen play by Luisa Irene Ickowitcz doesn't help either leaving the audience with a pretentious tale that is not convincing and, at times, sounds false. Yes, we are told about the atrocities committed in the past, but the present narrative has a soap opera feeling.

Jazmin Stuart, who plays Manuela, is about the best thing in the film. Dario Grandinetti, perhaps one of the best actors that have come out of the Argentine cinema, makes a wooden Luis Formosa, a man that is obvious the actor didn't care much for, the way he portrays him on the screen. Nicolas Cabre, Leonor Manso, the great Luis Luque, and the others in the cast struggle to give life to the picture, without much success.

There are other, better made films about the subject.

Tyranny of Photography and Script

[groggo · 3/10 · 27 February 2008]

This is an overlong but fairly interesting film concerning events surrounding the infamous 'disappearances' in Argentina during the military rule of the 1970s.

The delightful Argentine actor Jazmin Stuart plays Manuela, the 20-year-old daughter of a woman who has committed suicide. The movie follows her attempts to unravel the mystery of why her mother took her own life. She is confronted by yet more mystery when a stranger from Barcelona named Luis Formosa (Dario Grandinetti) enters her life. What follows is a laboured attempt to find 'truth'; there's a lot of weeping and forced melodrama: who is Manuela, who is her mother, was Luis a traitor or wasn't he?

The Argentine 'underground' during the 1970s figures prominently in this film, but we never really find out much about them: we assume they are leftists of some kind, but, oddly, they're never named as such. This is an odd 'hole' in the script: half of the film is spent talking about the 'movement'; what movement?

There is a huge problem with this film besides its script flaws. It has to do with photography. At least half of the film appears to be shot in full or semi-darkness; a large part of it is in silhouette. This is the death knell for flicks on DVD, unless you have a mammoth 60-inch plasma screen at home. In a movie theatre, it might have been a different movie. On my small home TV, the whole thing was pretty well wasted on me. I literally couldn't SEE the characters a good deal of the time.

I'm guessing Ciudad del sol (City of the Sun) was so named in an attempt at crude metaphorical irony. There's not much sun in sight, but a whole lot of darkness. Neither the metaphors nor the irony worked, for me at least. The ending aims at high drama, and ends with low cheesy. The hackneyed and trite symbols of light vs. dark are embarrassingly overused, and its the cinematography that suffers.