Lucrecia Martel: Three Early Short

MOVIE #1,224 • 🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿 • 11.06.23 To close out the Short Films Monday series for 2023, I decided to focus on a single filmmaker: Argentina’s Lucrecia Martel. I reviewed her most recent feature Zama several years ago, and while I feel my critique was slight, something about it has stuck with me (probably when the titular character gets his limbs chopped off). I was able to find all but two of her shorts (1989’s 24th Floor and 1991’s Red Kisses) on YouTube in mostly bad, sometimes un-subtitled versions, and on most Mondays for the rest of this year, I will review them, beginning with three of the earliest today.

The 56 (“El 56”) is a 90-second crudely animated work credited to five filmmakers. A guy with shades on jumps off a blimp and we see his broken glasses on the ground. I couldn't understand the dialogue before he jumps so I'm sure there's more going on.

You Won't Get Her, Bastard ("No te la llevarás, maldito") is a wordless two-minute piece billed as a "" set to some very dramatic but very 80s music and intercut with blasts of hand-drawn violent pictures depicting some of the action. It's great!

The Other ("La otra") is the longest clocking in at nine minutes. It is a documentary short about a drag queen and… no subtitles yet again but I'm sure it's good and very interesting! Collectively I give them all a 7 out of 10. Sure.

On Fridays starting in December, I will be checking out her first three feature films to complete this impromptu Director Focus as well. Stay tuned.

(PS. If anyone reading this has access to the two shorts I couldn’t find listed above, please let me know.)

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Lucrecia Martel (born December 14, 1966) is an Argentine film director, screenwriter and producer whose feature films have frequented Cannes, Venice, Berlin, Toronto, and many other international film festivals. Film scholar Paul Julian Smith wrote in 2015 that she is "arguably the most critically acclaimed auteur in Spanish-language art cinema outside Latin America" and that her "transnational auteurism and demanding features have earned her a hard-won reputation in the world art cinema festival circuit." It was released in 1988/1989.