Southern Storm

La Sudestada

International Film Festival Rotterdam

VERDICT: A cynical private detective becomes enthralled by a woman he is been paid to surveil in this unconventional and tender tale based on Juan Saenz Valiente’s graphic novel.

Adapted from a 2015 graphic novel of the same name by Juan Saenz Valiente, Southern Storm begins as a blend of familiar modes – South American social realism, a detective story – but keeps its audience off balance with both its narrative and tone. Making their first foray into fiction after a couple of documentary collaborations (Carack de nacar (2013), The Exact Shape of the Islands (2014)), directors Daniel Casabe and Edgardo Dieleke dexterously navigate the waters of this strange and ultimately uplifting mystery. Set in a humid but lonely Buenos Aires and the rising tides of the Rio de la Plata Delta this is part-procedural, part-metamorphosis.

There is hardly a better way to succinctly sum up the film’s protagonist, Jorge Villafanez (Juan Carrasco), than with the moniker this gumshoe goes by; ‘The Hound.’ While business seems to be going well, life is perhaps less fulfilling for Jorge. He spends his days pounding the streets of the city, allowing naive individuals that are too keen to talk to inadvertently spill the dirt on those he’s been tasked with researching. The work is unrewarding – and as he skewers an array of job applicants for their petty past mistakes, fairly mean-spirited – but he’s clearly good at it, and in demand. He has few friends, though, and spends his evenings alone in a cramped apartment, working on a case before staring out into the unfeeling city. However, when The Hound is set on the trail of an attractive dance choreographer by her suspicious husband, things begin to change.

Although the premise of a private detective becoming enamoured of a mark might conjure images of Hitchcock’s Vertigo, the direction that Southern Storm takes is one at once more offbeat but also considerably less oneiric. In observing Elvira (Katja Alemann) both at work, where she directs contemporary dance for a forthcoming retrospective, and privately, where she is clearly forlorn, Jorge intuits some form of connection between them. Casabe and Dieleke have crafted a work that, in its early stages, brims with an ambience of urban isolation. Jorge, in particular, lives a life full of social interaction, but he remains inarguably lonely. It is no coincidence that when the action broadens to the delta, and Jorge follows Elvira out to a ramshackle house on the riverbank there, the potential for a new way of being begins to coalesce in his mind.

Part of this sensation is achieved through dream sequences in which Jorge’s state of mind is made manifest and which are something brought over from the original comic. In an early one, the pavement of the street opens up and Jorge is swallowed by it. After he starts to tail Elvira, she appears in his dreams; in one such vision, the two of them are ensnared by tree branches, in a sequence reminiscent of Elvira’s dance routines, until Jorge realises that the branches are his own limbs as he towers over her. Whether this apparent empathy and conscience that he is developing, displayed through these surreal asides, will be enough to stop Jorge from reporting back to Elvira’s estranged husband is another matter entirely.

Carrasco is absolutely fantastic in the lead role, imbuing Jorge with the same weathered brusqueness and hard-headed apathy that leap out from the pages of the source material. However, this role is one that requires him to begin to shatter that veneer, to the point of performing imagined dance routines beneath a spotlight, while subsequently pulling things back down to earth in an instant. Katja Alemann is equally magnetic and, far from being purely a beautiful muse to inspire change, she undergoes it too. From the frustrated and depressed woman of the opening moments, she is reinvigorated. In one scene, Jorge explains to Elvira that he was born during a ‘southern storm’ and that it had an effect on him he still doesn’t understand. The fact that Jorge and Elvira act as one another’s storms in this film, is what sees it culminate far more in spiritual transformation than the cracking of the case. A Noirish conceit gives way to a vein of unlikely optimism – a precious thing indeed.

Directors: Daniel Casabe, Edgardo Dieleke
Cast: Katja Alemann, Juan Carrasco, Edgardo Castro
Producers: Alejandro Israel, Dana Najlis, Martín Granados, Edgardo Dieleke, Daniel Casabe
Screenplay: Edgardo Dieleke, Daniel Casabé, Marin Mauregui, Agustina Liendo
Cinematography: Leonardo Hermo
Editing: Daniel Casabe, Andres P. Estrada
Production Design: Tatu Ravotti
Sound Design: Lucas Larriera, Santiago Fumagalli
Music: Leonardo Martinelli
Production companies: Ajimolido Films, Obol Film Club, Tenemos las maquinas (all Argentina)
Venue: International Film Festival Rotterdam (Big Screen Competition)
In Spanish
86 minutes