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Product Detail |
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Audio Format: DD 5.1, DD 2.0 Video Format: Widescreen 2.35:1 (Anamorphic) Languages: Spanish Subtitles: Korean, English, French Region Code: 3 Year Made: 2005 Running Time: 125
Argentine helmer Luis Puenzo, best known for political fare like 1985's Oscar-winning "The Official Story," instead focuses on matters of the heart with the ambitiously conceived, albeit borderline pretentious, "The Whore and the Whale." An impressively crafted, visually spectacular big-budgeter spanning 70 years, pic seeks to combine epic sweep with an intimate study of one woman's spiritual regeneration, and almost succeeds.
 Pic shuttles between the early 1930s and the early 2000s, when thirtysomething Spanish novelist Vera (Aitana Sanchez-Gijon), suffering from an existential crisis as well as from breast cancer, comes across photos taken in the '30s. Commissioned by publisher and ex-b.f. Jordi (Pep Munne) to write about them, she takes the chance to escape and heads off to Argentina in search of the story.
In a Buenos Aires hospital, Vera has a mastectomy and meets an old woman, Matilde (Lydia Lamaison), who is visited by her son, Ernesto (Eduard Nuskiewicz). An uneasy romance gets under way between Ernesto and Vera, intensifying when Vera realizes she is more ill than she thought.
The 1930s story deals with the troubled passion between Argentinian photographer Emilio (Leonardo Sbaraglia) and Spanish prostitute Lola (Merce Llorens), exiled to Argentina. Work takes Emilio to Patagonia and to the brothel-club of blind tango musician Suarez (Miguel Angel Sola), living there with his daughter, the younger Matilde (Belen Blanco) and sundry other colorful characters.
The passion between Emilio and Lola starts to fade as Suarez makes his advances on her and they set up a menage-a-trois, Emilio all the time snapping the photos which Vera, 70 years later, will discover.
A whale is washed up on the nearby beach and becomes a photographic backdrop for Emilio; 70 years later, the same whale beaches up at the same place -- a non-too subtle metaphor for Vera vis-a-vis Lola, with whom she starts to identify.
Sanchez-Gijon's role is probably her meatiest to date, and she does well by it, though perhaps she is over-controlled at times. Later on, as a sick woman deciding to celebrate her sexuality, she struggles to find the right register.
Sola turns in a delightfully over-the-top perf as the dissolute, lecherous Suarez, Sbaraglia enjoys himself as the dandyish romancer Emilio, and Merce Llorens plays Lola with engaging vitality. But none of them, Sanchez-Gijon apart, ever wriggle free of stereotype. The role of Jordi is largely surplus to requirements, and too much of the last half hour of pic is given over to the dull revival of the relationship between him and Vera.
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