Fango

The countershot of the chimeric Paris-like city of Buenos Aires shows the poor disenfranchised areas around this city, inhabited by more than ten million people. This precarious urban area is the setting of a Western disguised as a social drama in which two unforgettable characters are tragically pushed to a final confrontation. Everything that happens before Nadia – a sort of female gang leader – and El Brujo – a decaying heavy-metal singer – face each other is the display of a real ethos which is almost never seen in film. Here, we can get a glimpse at some sort of domestic life, some codes of community cohabitation and some sort of justice beyond the institutions.

All the characters are great, from the musicians who are part of a ‘tango-trash’ band, to the members of the various gangs who inhabit this territory. The sociological precision of the tale finds its necessary correlative entity in Campusano’s formal and narrative rigour, with black fades at the final scene which are evidence of this director’s poetics.

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