Puzzle | Review

The only thing truly unique in regard to Argentinean writer-director Natalia Smirnoff’s small, slight Puzzle is the phenomenon of watching an actress who naturally exudes depth, mystery, and ulterior damage coerced into giving a broad, at times even hammy performance. As a reticent Buenos Aires housewife whose life is unfulfilled until she discovers her passion for competitive jigsaw puzzle assembly, the talented Maria Onetto (known best for Lucrecia Martel’s The Headless Woman) achieves only fleeting moments of authenticity. Lacking strong directorial choices, and never straying from predictable storytelling conventions, Smirnoff’s toneless feature debut fails to inspire in the viewer the catharsis it presumes for its protagonist. With its slim 89-minute running time, it fails even to inspire much restlessness; all told, it makes little impact of any kind.

Smirnoff’s story comes across as a short-film concept over-stretched to feature length. Onetto (whose eerie, troubling beauty is never used to maximum effect) stars as Maria del Carmen, an ordinary housewife in the Buenos Aires suburbs whose superior cooking and tight-lipped self-sacrificing go unheralded by her affable lug of a husband and breezily self-absorbed young-adult sons. By chance she discovers an affinity for putting together jigsaw puzzles, which leads to answering an ad to be the puzzle-competition partner of rich, handsome stranger. But will her newfound obsession threaten the status quo of her domestic world?

It will, but never to any great consequence. As Maria’s husband, Gabriel Goity is a thoroughbred actor never released from the starting gate. His character’s disapproval has no stamina, and so adds no risk to the drama. Goity’s capacity for simmering menace and devilish charm is mostly ignored by a screenplay that is afraid to throw its characters into serious conflict.

Veteran actor Arturo Goetz gives the most successful performance as Roberto, the wealthy puzzle aficionado who recruits Maria, trains her, and later attempts to seduce her. Goetz is the best kind of film actor, one who keeps secrets from the viewer. He gives an unpleated, unplanned performance, supplying the character with a compelling inscrutability.

The movie has some other high points, including a scene where Roberto and Maria take on Roberto’s former lover and her playing partner in an impromptu puzzle-off. The naked aggression and shameless verbal taunting rings unexpectedly true, and creates humor without being cartoonish. Smirnoff also subtly orchestrates, over a series of scenes, the slow-building sexual tension between Maria and Roberto.

Still, one longs for a director with the courage to make more definitive stylistic choices, one who might take inspiration from any of the great forerunners in the “trapped housewife” cinema genre. Smirnoff seems totally oblivious to (or unaffected by), for example, the stylistic grandeur of Douglas Sirk, the hypnotic minimalism of Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman,’ the clamorous expressionism of Cassavetes’ ‘A Woman Under the Influence,’ (or the heartfelt restraint of his son Nick Cassavetes’ under-acclaimed ‘Unhook the Stars’), or the socio-politicized melodramas of Fassbinder.

Instead, Smirnoff’s movie is dull, flat and without any style to speak of. A jaundiced yellow tint washes over the film’s color palette: It reads less like a creative decision and more as a lazy reliance on the default settings of the post-production DI software.

Equally peculiar are Smirnoff’s unrelentingly cramped frame compositions. At first it seems that this tactic is intentional, meant to create a visual claustrophobia to mirror Maria’s sense of entrapment within her roles as wife and mother. But the effect is so indiscriminately applied, that it increasingly reads as an aesthetic error, or even as a symptom of Smirnoff’s denial pathology: Her framing is so tight because she doesn’t want to step back and acknowledge the looming emptiness of her endeavour. She is like a puzzle assembler so focused on each separate piece that she never raises up to see that the big picture is a big blank.

Rating 2 stars