2023-10-28 02:55:00
Javier Milei managed to forget about asking the Argentine on duty in Madrid for an explanation of Peronism. That instance has been overcome and now clues are being sought about the mystery of the Argentine issue. Sometimes, with a twist: “If you understand what is happening in Argentina, it is because they have explained it to you badly.”
Annie Hall, perhaps Woody Allen’s best film, begins with a monologue in which he tells the joke of a man who goes to see a psychiatrist to ask for help for a trance that his brother is going through, who spends the day running around the house. while he crows, convinced that he is a chicken. “Bring him to the clinic and we’ll admit him,” the psychiatrist suggests and the man responds: “That’s impossible: I need the eggs.”
Allen refers to romantic relationships, but it can be applied to the country. Beyond having reached a situation bordering on madness, one tries to accept it and wait. The heart has reasons that reason does not understand.
These days, Allen’s latest film, Lucky Stroke, was released, filmed in Paris and with a French cast. The director returns with a theme that has obsessed him for decades: murder as a direct solution to the problems of private life. Among the films in which he has addressed this, it is interesting to review the one that has just been released with two others: Crimes and Sins and Match Point.
Stopping at them helps us think about our world, including Argentina. It is interesting to see the evolution of the stories in the last thirty years to tell the same theme, a narrative from which you can look at the global future as in a kaleidoscope and, of course, its reflection in the country, which is not a case isolated. Donald Trump, Jair Bolsonaro, Boris Johnson, Santiago Abascal, Matteo Salvini or Éric Zemmour are no more sensible politicians than Javier Milei.
In Crimes and Sins, a renowned ophthalmologist has a relationship with a stewardess, who asks him to leave his wife so they can live together. Urged by his lover, the protagonist finds no better way out than to turn to a brother linked to the underworld who resolves the situation with murder. The protagonist avoids guilt through a false redemption.
Match Point tells, twenty years later, the same story. A down-and-out tennis player gets a job as a teacher in an upper-class English club. The man advances in positions until he falls in love with and manages to marry the daughter of a high-ranking financier, who offers him a position in his company. The problem is that, at the same time, he maintains relations with a lover, who, as in Crimes and Sins, gives him an ultimatum. Here things are resolved quickly and directly. The tennis player, in a panic, kills the girl by his own hand, saving her good position. It is no longer a moral question: in 2005 there is no guilt.
The third film that has just been released, Luck, tells the relationship between a financier married to a much younger woman. The man, whose ability is to “make the rich richer” and with a dark past, suffers an attack of jealousy upon learning that his wife is in a relationship with someone as young as her. He does not hesitate to get him out of the way and then attempts to commit a second crime, wielding a weapon himself, which is thwarted by simple chance and thus saves a victim.
Three crimes in thirty years. The first is delegated not without guilt, at a time when the appearance of a certain morality was needed. The second, starring and executed by the hand of someone who does not want to be kicked out of a paradise in which there are fewer and fewer places. The latter, carried out shamelessly, almost serially and, unlike the previous ones, as a way of being in the world, integrated into it.
Allen’s narrative, perhaps without intending it, accompanies the decomposition of a way of life that is losing moral weight as the seams of meaning break.
Three candidates for the presidency with different modulations of the same framework with different narratives: a madman with a chainsaw, the preacher of “a holistic system” and a neo-Peronist defying destiny.
Borges appealed to horror as a link and now he resorts to the chance of the lesser evil. As in Allen’s joke, it seems he can’t do without eggs.
*Writer and journalist.
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#chainsaw #chance #eggs