Who among us can’t relate to Samuel Beckett’s post-apocalyptic word-worlds at the moment? The answer is apparently those who are too blind to see. El Pampero Cine multi-hyphenate Alejo Moguillansky grabs the Beckett play with the most appropriate title for this day and age in Endgame, whose original French title of Fin de Partie becomes his new film Pin de Fartie. (Farts and pins don’t come up at all, but other anagrams do.) This is the kind of word-scrambling that an editor comes up with, and Moguillansky’s extensive work editing several contemporary Argentinian classics is reflected in the oddball, jumpy structure of couples engaging with the Beckett play or something like it in their own unique ways. A king-like blind man and his servant-like daughter act out the play in their combative dynamic while they’re stuck in Switzerland; a pair of Argentinian actors with unspoken crushes on one another meet in an apartment to rehearse it; an old blind pianist and her son discover they have a similar dynamic to the play’s characters; and it’s all tied together by a couple in a recording studio where the woman serves as a narrator while the man sings songs and plays guitar as a sort of Greek chorus. (There’s also a pair of dumpster residents and a pair of filmmakers.) Everyone is living in a Beckettian world defined by one other person; everyone save that controlling, blind father wants out of it, and they all have their own coping methods (or lack thereof).
Like many other Argentinian films, both from the El Pampero Cine collective and not, Pin de Fartie is really about using seemingly every possible text or artistic medium for a type of postmodernist collage that owes as much to the spirit of Borges as it does to the kind of cultural omnivorousness that comes out of a major cultural center like Buenos Aires. When the pianist’s son (played by the director himself) discovers a real life tennis player who both looks like him and has a Beckett quote tattooed on his arm, it really does feel like something that was discovered in the process of constructing the project as a whole, and that spontaneity is charming. That moment of spontaneity and sense of letting the world in, however, is an exception in the overall structure of endgame after endgame, and many scenes of people listening to the circular opening movements of Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata until it feels like an audio purgatory. This is one of the most self-enclosed of this style of Argentinian films — even the final train ride that’s supposed to be freeing is juxtaposed as just another case of filmmakers playing with their toy train sets. Despite a clear desire to encapsulate the mood that comes about at the fin de partie that is our current moment, the gamesmanship never quite seems to enter reality, and Moguillansky and company are just as trapped as Beckett characters in the tyranny of the story they constructed. The fact that this sort of controlling behavior is an explicit preoccupation of the film suggests a darker route to the Pampero playfulness, undercurrents of the anxiety of influence are what really linger — the sense that it’s easier to reread and reanalyze Beckett one more time than to try and create something as original. It’s both vulnerable and original, and guarded and derivative — just like its title.
Published as part of NYFF 2025 — Dispatch 2.
Comments are closed.