Argentine writer-director-producer Diego Lerman is one of Latin America’s most successful crossover filmmakers whose feature films have circled the globe winning prizes at festivals while they have also been able to attract commercial audiences. With The Substitute (El Suplente), his sixth feature, it is obvious how hard the film works to communicate with the audience, and the message the characters passionately convey is an important one about recovering the stragglers left behind by Argentine society and never giving up on the hard cases. Or as the film puts it, “no one saves himself alone”. Screening in competition at San Sebastian after its bow in Toronto, this classroom drama should make an attractive art house choice, developing a familiar theme in a very Argentine idiom.
Actor Juan Minujin, who played the young Pope Francis in The Two Popes, sports a thick beard in the main role of Lucio, a wired writer with literary ambitions, which he enviously sees realized by his ex-wife (Barbara Lennie), who is a published poet. Some sparks fly when they share a book presentation in a crowded old bookstore, a charming scene that smoothly introduces the city’s lively intellectual life.
The contrast couldn’t be greater when Lucio drives off to an outlying neighborhood for his first day of work as a substitute teacher. The school isn’t bad-looking, and the principal (Rita Cortese) and other teachers are friendly and understanding enough. (Maria Merlino stands out as a fearless teacher who takes Lucio into a dangerous slum to talk to a student’s family – then back to her apartment.) He expertly takes over the class like a stage entertainer. But all his energy, imagination and good will seem wasted on the deadbeat, highly demotivated kids with no interest in learning and who are convinced that literature serves no purpose. It will take the whole film to bring them around to writing a simple essay, a victory Lucio celebrates with a concealed look of joyful disbelief. But before that high point, he gets caught up in a major school crisis when drugs are found in the lavatory and the police are brought in to preside over the classrooms, eroding the trust he has carefully built with his students.
However, his classroom battle for young minds is only part of the film. The well-paced screenplay, written by Lerman with Maria Meira and Luciana de Mello, often switches to Lucio’s private life. In the beginning, this includes his difficult relationship with his teenage daughter, a talented musician who resists her parents’ ambitions for her and their insistence that she change schools to a posh music academy. This pressure to achieve seems both natural, coming from such educated parents, and a bit ironic, given Lucio’s implicit commitment to teaching disadvantaged kids.
This is further underlined (but less naturally, more narratively contrived) in Lucio’s father Roberto, known as El Chileno, the beloved and uncompromising leader of a community center in the barrio. He is played by veteran Alfredo Castro (From Afar) as an eccentric wild man on a mission, who is savvy enough to know he needs political support to fund the center, even if it means choosing the lesser of several evils. With his son Lucio – who touchingly worries about the old man’s health – he is brusque and businesslike, but they have an enemy in common, the drug lord El Perro, who is running for mayor against the left-wing incumbent allied with El Chileno.
The political plot at times seems unnecessarily intricate, though it’s also subtle and probably much easier for an Argentinian to catch the nuances. At a certain point it converges on another thread in the story, Lucio’s protective feelings towards the bright-eyed student Dylan (Lucas Arrua), whose brutally underprivileged background brings him into El Perro’s circle of pushers. This subplot culminates in a well-shot and quite thrilling chase scene through the dilapidated city, where the uninhabited shells of buildings form a precarious hive. As an ending, though, the action climax feels a little too rote to be convincing in a story so full of realistic details.
Minujin gives a strikingly deep performance as a literary man with a lot on his mind, yet always pulled in the right direction by his conscience and admirable for his innately selfless social consciousness. D.P. Wojciech Staron finds just the right lighting and camera angles – generally a bold profile shot – to capture the man. Lerman is not shy about turning up the volume of José Villalobos’s music, a wide-ranging feast that gives scenes punch.
Director: Diego Lerman
Screenplay: Diego Lerman, Maria Meira, Luciana de Mello
Cast: Juan Minujin, Barbara Lennie, Alfredo Castro, Maria Merlino, Lucas Arrua, Rita Cortese
Producers: Nicolas Avruj, Marta Donzelli, Sandra Tapia, Nicolas Celis, Dominique Barneaud
Cinematography: Wojciech Staron
Editing: Alejandro Brodersohn
Production design: Marcelo Chavez
Costume design: Sandra Fink
Music: José Villalobos
Sound: Lena Esquenazi, Leandro de Loredo
Production companies: Campo Cine (Argentina), Vivo Film (Italy), Arcadia Motion Pictures (Spain), Esperanto Kino (Mexico), Bellota Films (France)
World Sales: Urban Sales (France)
Venue: San Sebastian Film Festival Film Festival (Competition)
In Spanish
110 minutes
