Hawaii

A summer in Argentina. Eugenio is alone at the country house he inherited from an uncle. The man who turns up looking for work is a childhood friend, Martin, now jobless and homeless and sleeping in an abandoned shed. Eugenio does not say at once that he recognises him. Then he gives him work, then offers him a room, and the two men spend the whole summer in the same house without saying anything to each other. The subject is looking. The dialogue is ordinary and unimportant; what matters is who looks where and when, who gets into the pool in front of whom, who sleeps in which room. Marco Berger sets this up almost as a system of rules, and all the tension comes from what is not said. Marco Berger wrote and directed. Manuel Vignau plays Eugenio and Mateo Chiarino plays Martin. Class sits underneath the whole thing: one owns the house, the other is the employee, and that is what makes the relationship hard to form. Who it is for: anyone who likes quiet, slow cinema built on the gaze. Who it is not for: anyone waiting for events. Almost nothing happens, the camera looks insistently at bodies, and the film repeats itself in the last half hour.