During my short self-directed crash course on Argentine cinema last month, I was surprised how little had been written in English on the subject. There are specialty studies, especially regarding the country’s golden era of noir filmmaking, but certainly no one-stop shop for the merely curious. My own knowledge of the subject was limited to the tango stars of the ’30s, those big noir films from Leopoldo Torre Nilsson (AKA “Babsy”) and Carlos Hugo Christensen, surreal political thrillers that not-so-obliquely comment on the various dictatorships (like Hugo Santiago’s great Invasion), and the recent works from the El Pampero Cine folks. Similarly, my knowledge on Argentina itself was spotty, and similarly, English-language books on Perón and the “Dirty War” far outnumbered general histories.
So, I merely branched out from what was already familiar and stumbled across director Ricardo Becher, a writer and frequent AD for Nilsson on several celebrated works, including 1963’s The Terrace and Seventy Times Seven. While Nilsson steadily pushed the sex-and-violence boundaries of Argentine film during this period of post-Perón dictatorships, he wasn’t quite living the bohemian lifestyle that his collaborator Becher found in the arts community of Buenos Aires. Near the end of the ’60s, Becher took this experience even further than his mentor by adapting an almost-true book about the sex lives of porteño artists and intellectuals. This was Tiro de gracia, a New Wave and New Hollywood-inspired portrait of Argentina’s avant-garde, starring Argentina’s avant-garde, and it was exactly the kind of hidden Argentine history I was looking for.
While Tiro de gracia was directed by Ricardo Becher, the personality of the film was crafted by its writer and star Sergio Mulet. Nicknamed “the Yeti,” Mulet fancied himself a free spirit — a freedom his art ought to match — which inevitably aligned him with American contemporaries Allen Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs. He bought into this comparison to the Beats for his own marketing purposes, but his “Opium Group” was distinctly Argentine in its concerns. They wrote about themselves and their immediate experiences in a very specific part of Buenos Aires; they were politically on the left, but, like many developing leftists in Latin America, broke from the rules and institutions of old cadres in favor of a more globalized counter-culture (of which rock music was at the center). All of this is on display in Mulet’s meandering hangout film.
Tiro de gracia settles into a pretty recognizable pattern immediately: sex, hanging out at the café (always the Modern Bar, the real-life hangout of the Opium Group), gossip, a party, sex, friends falling out thanks to all the sex that wasn’t supposed to have strings attached, repeat. In the background, Daniel (Mulet) slowly keeps up with a slow-moving criminal plot involving some of the older, more self-serious members of the group. His girlfriend (a loose title considering everyone’s seeing each other in this) castigates him for his drinking, which he deals with by drinking. He loses his place to stay, so he starts crashing at his buddy Paco’s (Javier Martínez) place, only to begin sleeping with Paco’s girlfriend, Greta (Christina Plate). Eventually, Daniel leaves Buenos Aires to become a farmhand for petty cash, but his eventual return is ruined thanks to a promised act of violence. This isn’t exactly a romantic portrayal of free love bohemia, nor is it a reactionary critique of a subculture lived through and thrown away. Instead, it’s terribly honest about the personal and political foibles of youth movements that speak of freedom as a lifestyle aesthetic rather than a hard-won ideal. It’s an excoriation of the economic and political conditions that brought them to this. Worst of all, it seems like these artists are getting very little art made.
Meanwhile, the camera is unafraid to zoom out every once in a while. The film doesn’t quite have the hyper-mobile vérité feel of, say, Breathless, but it’s a good bit looser than even the more adventurous New Hollywood films of the time. Party scenes cut after just snippets of dialogue, characters walk down real Buenos Aires streets with a shaky lens just steps in front of them, and the sex scenes are shot in a tastefully frank manner (though bodies and deliberate framing block the naughty bits, it’s easy to tell a fellatio from the general writhing and squirming that denotes coitus). Perhaps the most notable stylistic choice: this was the first Argentine film with a rock soundtrack, supplied by actor Javier Martínez’s band Manal. But the unsettling noodling of the guitar and the quick tempo of the drums only come in during bizarre scenes, such as the surreal re-enactment of a firing squad that never shoots any live rounds, or a scene with a brief sado-masochistic belting. For a film indebted to neorealist choices (such as location shooting), it also leaves strict reality on a whim, such as a very uncomfortable scene in which a little girl appears to suck blood off Daniel’s pricked finger. Bizarre choices abound, but they mesh well in this portrait of a group equally indebted to European, American, and Argentine culture.
But, even though the film is notable for its pioneering formal techniques, Tiro de gracia is even more valuable as a cultural document à la Don’t Look Back (1967), Pull My Daisy (1957), or The Connection (1959). The film stars several Argentine artists who frequented the counterculture scene of the Modern Bar, including Manal, Roberto Plate, Perez Celis, and Oscar Masotta — many of whom overlapped with the prestigious avant-garde cultural center, the Instituto Di Tella. And, while Argentine films like the same year’s sexploity “Euro-”horror The Curious Dr. Humpp also featured plenty of sex, only Tiro de gracia contains a scene that shows the prevalence of urban “taxi boys” (male prostitutes) and their cruising habits.
Though I was searching for the typical Argentine film and a general Argentine history, unique films such as this can teach just as much. And while the depiction of a libertine youth culture during the Onganía years feels revolutionary, Becher’s fusion of immediate Latin American history with contemporary European style shows the same aesthetic concerns that his surreal noir-peddling predecessors like Nilsson did during the first Perón years. This one’s just a little louder.
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