Embracing Samuel Beckett’s Endgame, Fin de Partie creates a hall of mirrors exploring finitude and dependency. It presents a world of looming farewells and inevitable “endgame,” where characters in various duos are trapped between dependency and autonomy. To add to the fun, filmmaker Alejo Moguillansky and his extended family of collaborators (we once again find his daughter) uses Beckett’s text as a scaffold to meditate on art itself, layering rehearsal and artifice to question whether life and affection are genuine or pre-staged within a world of borrowed texts. It’s also a film text where the apocalypse is not for tomorrow, but might have occurred yesterday.
Part of the Argentinian clique known as El Pampero Cine who have supplied the A list festivals with cinema that knowns no bounds (notably La Flor and Trenque Lauquen), I had the chance to speak to Alejo Moguillansky on his latest oeuvre which was selected for Venice Film Festival’s Orizzonti section. In my sit-down with the filmmaker, we got to chat about the idea of repetition in the film, working with spaces, some of the political issues included in the text and how the collective decides on who will be next in line to shoot their feature.
