In most years ¡Viva! features comedies and some, like The Weasel’s Tale, are major productions in CinemaScope with a running time of over 2 hours. I’m often wary of comedies since as the convention in the film industry has it, subtitles don’t always do justice to witty dialogue and many gags and comic situations are based around local cultural conventions. For the first 20 or 30 minutes of this film I wasn’t completely sure about it even though I was starting to enjoy it. I turned to look at the brochure blurb and realised that it was co-written and directed by Juan José Campanella, whose big international success was El secreto de sus ojos (The Secret in Their Eyes, Argentina-Spain 2009) and that encouraged me further. Eventually it kicked into full gear for me.
The film’s English title is a direct translation of the Spanish, so what does it mean? Four now elderly filmmakers live in a large rural mansion in its own extensive grounds. Mara Ordaz (Graciela Borges) was once a leading lady, a star of romantic pictures in the 1960s. She owns the house along with her husband Pedro (Luis Brandoni) a fellow actor, although in smaller parts. Now he is in a wheelchair and spends his time painting. There are two permanent house guests, Norberto (Oscar Martínez) who was once Mara’s director and Martín (Marcos Mundstock) who was the unit’s scriptwriter. Both men have lost their wives, one of whom was Mara’s sister. The film’s title is explained on one level by Norberto’s penchant for firing his shotgun at random moments, claiming to be hunting weasels in the grounds. (The weasel we see looks larger and very different to a British weasel and I can’t find them amongst Argentinian mammals, perhaps they are an imported species.) The quartet of filmmakers appears to live in some sort of phoney war. The three men are friends but Mara mistrusts them.
One day, a young couple appear claiming to be lost and unable to phone Buenos Aires where they have a meeting. They inveigle themselves into the house to use the landline and claim to recognise Mara as a great star of the past. The trio of old men are suspicious but soon the couple have wooed Mara and convinced her that she should sell the house and move back to the city. We immediately suspect that they are crooks (or lawyers! – weasels?) and we look forward to the battle of wits, especially between Norberto and Martín on one side and the young woman, Bárbara (Clara Lago) on the other. Mara and Pedro are involved in some deep retrospection about their marriage.
The last section is all out war. There are only two sets of locations in the film, the house and grounds and an upmarket restaurant and the office of the couple in the city. The ‘action’ then depends on the performances and the mise en scène. The film is theatrical and plays around with the house as a location. According to The Hollywood Reporter review, it’s actually a remake of a 1976 Argentinian comedy with the English title Yesterday’s Guys Used No Arsenic. The same review suggests it shares something with Ealing comedies and in a way it does draw on both Kind Hearts and Coronets and The Ladykillers. All six actors are well cast and and give terrific performances. For me the key scenes are the direct conflicts between Clara Lago and Oscar Martínez.
The house is full of the props from Mara’s films and she watches her old films just like the heroines of classic Hollywood. Norberto and Martín play games of pool and chess and plot. The triumph of the script is to construct scenes as if they are being written for a classic movie to be made. It works well and because these filmmakers made mainstream genre films, not art films, the script ideas they create are easily accessible. I suppose one of the issues is the appeal of a film like this to older audiences. The villains are the young, characterised her as being concerned only about ‘winning’ and not the ‘morality’ found in the classic movie scripts. This age divide is also reflected in the choice of popular songs on the soundtrack, all from the 1950s/early 1960s and featuring Brenda Lee, The Platters, Chuck Berry and Perry Como. These are played by Norberto and Martín as a backdrop to their activities. The songs also help to emphasise that presence of American popular music and Hollywood’s impact on Latin American cinema in the 1950s/60s. Otherwise the only political dimension is the revelation that Norberto lost studio support when he made a documentary about the ‘peasantry’ and Martín joined him in a form of exile during the political conflict in Argentina in the 1970s and 1980s. The film could lose a few minutes but otherwise it works well.
I’m not sure if this is likely to get a UK release but it should be attractive to streaming sites and it’s exactly the kind of diverting entertainment we need right now. Here is the Spanish trailer (no English subs):
The Case for Global Film 