New York Film Festival 2014

[Chris Knipp]

MARTIN REJTMAN: TWO SHOTS FIRED (2014)


Still from an early sigment of Two Shots Fired

One inexplicable thing after another, in and around Buenos Aires

In his recent Toronto coverage for The Dissolve, "Day 3: Men, Women, Children," Mike D'Angelo lists the Frenchman Laurent Cantet and the Argentinian Martin Rejtman as "two auteurist favorites" who "haven't done their best work this year." He describes Cantet's Return to Ithica (which I haven't seen) as " a laborious Havana-set Big Chill" he sees as a string of repetitious conversations dwelling on good old days. He goes on: "Rejtman’s Two Shots Fired, by contrast, serves up a placid series of largely unrelated vignettes, indulging in drollery for drollery’s sake. Two shots do in fact get fired, into a head and a stomach at point-blank range; it’s typical of the film’s ultra-low-key approach that the bullets do no real damage." In his running Twitter "reviews" D'Angelo gave the film a 48 rating, ranking it 23rd out of the 36 he saw at Toronto. Even so, his description seems kindly, but this may be explained by the fact he gives in his Tweet that he previously "really liked" Rejtman's The Magic Gloves.

Without any prior experience of Rejtman's apparently admired previous work, Two Shots Fired seems first flat, then absurdist, finally simply pointless in its succession of one studiously bland narrative moment after another. Rejtman, as Jay Weissberg puts it in Variety, "picks up on various family members and their extended circles, dropping storylines and characters with studied disregard for narrative arcs," but "doesn’t really go anywhere with the concept, yet there’s enough skill and amusement to hold fest audiences." This conclusion of festival-friendliness seems a little generous: the "skill and amusement" are difficult to discern.

Festival-friendly, no; auteurist-friendly, perhaps. It's often the case that one work by a filmmaker makes much more sense within his or her whole oeuvre; even unsuccessful efforts may be an interesting variation or shed light on other work that's more worth our attention. This makes the interest of Two Shots Fired restricted to those who know -- and like -- its maker's work. Weissberg also points out that Two Shots Fired is a return to feature filmmaking after a ten-year hiatus. Perhaps Rejman is having trouble getting back up to speed.

For a while the conversations in Two Shots Fired have the bright, neutral banality and lack of affect of Fifties absurdist drama, a touch of the idiotic logic Eugene Ionesco discovered in English language textbooks and translated into his play La Cantatrice Chauve. But nothing Rejtman provides here has the brilliance or ringing absurdity of Ionesco. Instead, his movie begins to feel like some inexplicable instructional film or the work of a deranged amateur. One can see from Leslie Felperin's review for Variety of Rejtman's 2003 The Magic Gloves that the director employed a similar series of interlocking absurd plots, but they seem to have gained unity and point in the earlier film from a focus on economic problems. Felperin describes Rejtman as "Laconic and deadpan in the tradition of Aki Kaurismaki or early Jim Jarmusch." That quality is lacking here, but one might also note Felperin's warning, "Some of the patter will play better to auds fluent in Spanish." And Argentinian Spanish, to boot.

Two Shots Fired/Dos disparos, 104 min., debuted at Lucarno. It was screened for this review as part of the Main Slate of the 52nd New York Film Festival, 2014. US theatrical release Wed. 13 May 2015.