A punishingly paced, self-consciously arty Argentinean Western about a mysterious do-gooder (Gael Garcia Bernal) who decides to help a terrorized farmer take a stand against murderous land-grabbers, The Ardor tries to make an ill-defined philosophical statement about man, animal and the animal within man, but gets more lost in the weeds than its subjects do in the dense, overgrown rainforest that serves as the movie’s setting. This out-of-competition premiere at the 2014 Cannes Film Festival is steeped in atmosphere but lacking any sort of mooring or punch that would make an audience care—it’s a fine example of cinema that feels like it would connect much better if reverse-adapted into a book.
Not to be confused with Byun Young-joo’s 2002 South Korean import Ardor, writer-director Pablo Fendrik’s film centers around a young man whom the credits identify as Kai (Bernal), but who is essentially The Man With No Name. As a group of armed mercenaries, led by Tarquinho (Claudio Tolcachir), set fire to a hillside as part of their apparent plot to take over as much slightly farmable jungle acreage as possible, Kai scampers away. Shirtless and barefoot, he is taken in by a kindly neighboring farmer (Chico Diaz) and his daughter Vania (Alice Braga). After her father is cut down by the aforementioned mercenaries, Vania is kidnapped. Kai promptly rescues her, and the pair then makes off into the wilderness, trailed by the men with guns.
Bested by Wild Tales as Argentina’s Best Foreign Language Film Oscar submission last year, Fendrik’s movie is less methodical cat-and-mouse, and more meandering statement about the avarice of man. It pays rich, obvious homage to classical filmmaking—most emphatically in a willfully evocative finale that apes the square-jawed tropess of Sergio Leone Westerns that are now deployed as visual shorthand in TV commercials advertising canned chili. (Sebastian Escofet’s music for this sequence even incorporates tolling bells.)
Fendrik clearly fancies his movie a mixture of suspense and swollen genre metaphor, but both his writing and his stagings habitually undercut him. His characterizations are wafer thin, which feed a general lack of tension. Kai has a connection to Tarquinho and his crew, of course, but it’s not something that really elevates The Ardor or takes it off in any interesting or different direction. Then there’s an absolutely ridiculous “escape” sequence where Kai rows away down a river while two men unload bullets all around him, finally shattering an oar but not hitting him. This would seem to indicate a more, well, representational or ethereal grasp of action and spatial relationships, but other sequences are constructed more literally.