He has the power to make or break careers. He is quoted all over town. His editors despair of his latest negative notice.
He is … the film critic.
This fantasy figure is the main character of a new film by Argentine director (and former critic) Hernán Guerschuny, and it’s a movie with only one comic idea. But it’s a fun idea: Although Victor Tellez (professorial grouch Rafael Spregelburd) loathes romantic comedies and regularly incinerates them in his newspaper reviews, he meets a woman, Sofia (Dolores Fonzi), who embodies all the bubbly, life-affirming qualities of the rom-com heroine — a stereotype now permanently fixed as the Manic Pixie Dream Girl.
Not only that, the movie we are watching begins to take on the style of the rom-com, complete with steals from “When Harry Met Sally” and “Runaway Bride.” Add some inside-baseball material about the fascinating, fascinating world of film critics, and “The Film Critic” has just enough to sustain its joke.
Guerschuny layers in the rom-com gestures — a slow track in on Victor’s face as he watches Sofia dance, for instance (“Why am I seeing this in slow motion?” he asks himself, but the audience knows why, because we’ve seen these movies). And yes, we can expect a scene of the hero running through city streets in the rain as violins swell on the soundtrack.
At one point Victor begins weeping while screening a shameless tearjerker, and is ridiculed throughout Buenos Aires for reviewing the movie with the phrase, “Life is a passage filled with opportunities.” Has he gone soft?
An odd, mostly misfired subplot, about a vengeful young filmmaker who wants to strike back at Victor because of a negative review, doesn’t really come off. The movie’s best at wry humor, especially in the way Victor wrests control of the picture back to his own taste (the ending of “The Film Critic” is the sort he prefers).
He explains this to us in his voiceover — which is in French, not Spanish, because he likes movies narrated in French. (That’s a good movie joke.)
Compared to “Adaptation,” an incisive movie that also turns into the kind of formula its protagonist hates, “The Film Critic” offers modest fun, and doesn’t leave much in its wake. But hey, don’t listen to me — you might laugh, you might cry, you might find it the feel-good laff riot of the summer. Life is a passage filled with opportunities, as I’ve often said.
“The Film Critic” (3 stars)
A Buenos Aires movie reviewer finds his hatred of romantic comedies tested when he meets a woman straight out of “When Harry Met Sally.” A modest comedy, but this Argentine film plays its one joke reasonably well. In Spanish and French, with English subtitles.
Rating: Not rated; probably PG for subject matter
Showing: Grand Illusion
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