Santiago (Guillermo Pfening) seems to have the perfect life: a successful interior design business with his gorgeous wife, an adoring young daughter and an immaculate home in Buenos Aires. When his world is irreversibly shattered in an accident, it is the last predictable moment in this hauntingly intimate film. Resurfacing in deepest Patagonia, Santiago lives a boring, brutal and at times claustrophobic existence, maintaining an airstrip in the harsh landscape. As in his earlier work (Crane World, El Bonaerense), director-screenwriter Trapero's slow, careful camera dwells on the rhythms of Santiago's quotidian existence -- going on a hunting trip, waiting for the once-weekly plane to arrive, having sex with the local barkeep-prostitute -- to tease out the story and the character of a male lead who is not willing to give himself away. The ending packs a fierce, if quiet, punch -- one greater than the viewer may expect after this winding tale of how one man travels literally to the end of the earth in order to find himself again. With his fourth film, Trapero reaffirms his status as one of the most thoughtful and expressive leading lights in the current revitalization of Argentine cinema.

Pablo Trapero