Extraño

New Argentine cinema may be suffering from a lack of money and related misery as a result of the economic crisis, but there is anything but a lack of ideas and talent. Extraño is intimate cinema at its very best. The protagonist is Axel, aged about 40, a doctor who no longer practices his craft, but we never really find out why. He is living temporarily with his sister and her children. He doesn’t do much, just exists a little between the living and their things. One day, he meets a young, pregnant woman. A relationship develops, a kind of love, and they live together, like driftwood temporarily clinging on to each other. But Axel’s movements are hesitant. He goes to visit an old lover.In his first feature film, Santiago Loza has created an enormous intensity using the beautiful camera work by Willi Behnisch, the lighting, the moving soundtrack and not lastly the emotionally precise and subdued acting: Julio Chávez in the leading role is truly great.In other words, Loza succeeds gloriously in his aim to make a modest film about things that are not easily perceptable in a human life, but which are deeply felt. As the makers say: `This is a film of cautious words, of a fragile silence.’