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| | In my early twenties, I took to saying—with ironic authority—that books from Latin America and Eastern Europe were the only ones telling the truth. Right now, I'd tell you this about the movies I've been watching. There's an understanding of power and the ways in which human drama plays against an insistent backdrop of catastrophe that's at all times capitalistic, climactic, and corporate-algorithmic. There's absurdity and surrealism that amplifies these tensions between the mundane and the apocalyptic. The wifi is rarely any good and the toilet sometimes needs to be flushed with a bucket. | One of these movies is Magic Farm, which came out this spring, and was written and directed by Amalia Ulman, who also plays a hinge role in the film. She comes from the art world, and her debut feature, El Planeta, speaks to the experience of trying to do culture work without any financial stability (among other things). Magic Farm is a much bigger production and brings the crew of a Vice-like TV show to rural Argentina, the town of San Antonio de Areco right outside Buenos Aires. They're there to film an episode about a reggaetón artist who wears rabbit ears, after already doing pieces on Bolivian teen exorcists and Mexican dancers in spiky boots. Obviously, they love to mine Latin America for its subcultures. | Ulman (who lives in New York, grew up in Spain, and was born in Argentina) draws these types with such extreme accuracy, and her character Elena becomes the straight man acting as the only person on the crew who can translate and doesn't get too sucked into the dramas. The two young Brooklyn dude producers are dressed as very specific archetypes ('70s guy and whatever the contemporary equivalent of "hipster" is), and Chloë Sevigny is brilliant as the "iconic" host Edna in bright green leather shorts and white Tabis talking to a horse as the only creature in whom she can confide. It turns out that the reggaetón artist they seek lives in a different country and they have to manufacture a trend of wearing gift bows. | Knowing the bones of the plot doesn't detract from the experience of watching it, I think: It reminds me of Brandon Taylor writing about wanting to read novels that are written as novels, that do only what prose can do. This is a story that is so visually told and sonically layered that it needs to be watched. | | "What is the relation of the metropolis to the periphery of empire?" is the obvious big question that could be asked. Here, more truthfully, who has the actual power gets all twisted up amid language barriers, sexual desire, and currency exchange rates. Social media is presented as a means of gaining connection and earning status for the people of the town, who are savvy enough not to fully buy what these gringos are selling but bored enough to entertain it. Stray animals are characters themselves, with the camera occasionally put on them to show their perspective. The colors are bright, almost sickeningly so, and the soundtrack of distorted cumbia villera adds to the farce. | I adore so much about this gringos-out-of-water tale, but what I really love is how every real issue is presented just out of focus and secondary to the need to film something, to romance, to adulterous affairs resulting in pregnancy, to teaching a neighborhood kid to skateboard. | When they are invited into a local woman named Popa's house, the first sign that something is amiss is that they cannot drink water from the tap—no explanation given. Then, at a corner store, a woman sitting outside talks about her daughter being ill and another young child having cancer; she is in focus long enough for us to get the gist, and then she fades out. Eventually, the crew is under a crop-dusting plane spraying glyphosate on the soybean fields that is obviously to blame for the sickness in town. In 1996, Argentina was the first South American country to adopt GMO soy, and the connection of agrochemicals to cancer in the country has been shown. As the crew drives away at the end, a radio program soundtracking their anguish confirms this. There's the real measure of power, then: the ability to get away from the glyphosate. | It's not just about agrochemicals. During a dance audition for their gift bow video, one teenager shows up with a green bandanna around her neck after a protest for abortion rights; another teen tells her how her boyfriend died of cancer but she's more upset that he might have been cheating on her. The head of the company, Edna's husband Dave played with nicely understated smarm by Simon Rex, is being outed for sexual harassment; the crew is more concerned about the future of their jobs. | In treating all these real-world struggles as parts of the colliding narratives occurring, life is represented accurately. This is how most people live, ignoring what's really wrong in the world to get on with the work, get laid, decide whether to keep the baby. If you show the catastrophes straight-on, many react like you've forced them to stare directly into the sun. The only way to maybe make people look is by injecting it into the atmosphere. And even then… | In this, it reminded me a lot of Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World by Romanian director Radu Jude, the work of writer-comedian Julio Torres, and Chilean director Sebastian Silva's Rotting in the Sun (I couldn't finish right when it started going because of a plot twist that made me ill, but I loved what I saw). None of this work is overly cynical nor preachy; it's representative, or at least that's how it feels to me, living for six years where the wifi is often spotty and sometimes you have to flush with a bucket and the catastrophes are right there in the air. I watch something marked "absurdist" or "surrealist" or "black comic" and I feel like I can relax: Finally, reality. | | | | The Desk Salon Series | | On July 20, we invite Anya von Bremzen—author of National Dish, current Book Club selection Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking, and much more—for a conversation about her life, work, and approach to food memoir. Sign up here. Members can find the free access code at this link. |
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| | The Desk Book Club | We're reading Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking: A Memoir of Food and Longing by Anya von Bremzen. We will have the Zoom discussion on Sunday, July 20, at 1 p.m. EST, with the author herself. You can buy all the 2025 Desk Book Club picks at this year's partner bookstore, D.C.'s Bold Fork Books, for 20% off with the code at this link. |
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| |  | My book in Portuguese—out now in Brazil. |
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