It’s a fool’s errand, perhaps, to lob disparagement at a movie called The Film Critic, but here goes: An intermittently involving curio that only engages its meta-style conceit in too-timid half measures, writer-director Hernan Guerschuny’s Argentinian import feels like a potentially great short film stretched out to feature length by way of an ill-conceived adaptation. Lacking more defined instincts for either comedy or drama, The Film Critic exists in a muddled, mushy middle ground.
On one level, Buenos Aires journalist Victor Tellez (Rafael Spregelburd) lives a life familiar to a lot of film critics and entertainment journalists: He spends many of his days at a screening room, where gathered colleagues gossip about the latent meaning of a certain movie’s festival slotting, and one gorges himself on coffee and free snacks. Tellez, though, is in an existential funk. And though the movie unfolds in Spanish, the omniscient title character narrates it in French, in one of several nods to that country’s groundbreaking New Wave movement.
“A terrorist of taste,” according to his editor, Tellez has arguments over cinema with his teenage niece, Agatha (Telma Crisanti), and also suffers verbal slings and arrows from Leo (Ignacio Rogers), a vindictive director out to settle a score from a bad review. Tellez’s humdrum everyday life is most upturned, however, by the introduction of Sofia (Dolores Fonzi), a bohemian woman he meets while searching for a new apartment. Much to his befuddlement and discontent, Tellez then finds himself living out the beats of an emotionally saccharine story of midlife uplift.
On the surface, The Film Critic seems built for much self-satisfied navel-gazing, but in the combination of its central character and its ripened self-awareness, it has some of the ingredients for a provocative work. The deeply interior nature of a critic—of commingled self-doubt and the tendency to sometimes analyze conversation as a plot element, for instance—lends itself to all sorts of delicious potential. (Adaptation captured a lot of this, brilliantly.) But in a way it’s hard to take Guerschuny’s movie too seriously, because Tellez comes off as too much of a cliché—a dour scold who rolls his eyes at populist opinions, regarding them as hopelessly uninformed—as the rom-com conventions he’s so grown to despise. This is mitigated somewhat by playwright/actor Spregelburd, who has a slightly roguish, deceptively professorial masculinity. He’s kind of like a South American Michael Stuhlbarg by way of Javier Bardem, and watching him, one feels the ridges of a rich (and principled) interior dissatisfaction, and it buckling under the weight of new experience.
Most problematically, though, The Film Critic takes too long to get to its inciting incident, and even then only really stretches out its legs and exercises them in fits and starts. Sofia, of course, is meant to serve as a meta-commentary on the quirky female-as-muse-and-savior (as are other supporting character archetypes). But Guerschuny never sketches out these characters with the sort of strong, distinct details that would give Tellez more of something to play off. The movie’s gentle chiding of cinematic formula and convention never coheres as something radically inventive, or takes flight as top-shelf satire.
Guerschuny is a longtime critic himself, and The Film Critic represents his feature debut, so on that curve and attendant scale of expectation—as more of a professional/academic exercise than a crafted piece of narrative entertainment—the movie moves the needle a bit more. Certainly he has an occasionally evident gift for pinprick funny dialogue (“I’ve been having terrible taste recently in emotions,” says Tellez at one point) that is utterly delightful. But Guerschuny seems to pull away from a more robustly comedic rendering of his concept, so the film becomes less a big, movie-valentine pretzel and more just a tangled mess of cute, doughy cinematic tweaks and jabs.
Director: Hernan Guerschuny
Writer: Hernan Guerschuny
Starring: Rafael Spregelburd, Dolores Fonzi, Telma Crisanti, Ignacio Rogers
Release Date: May 22 in New York and Los Angeles
Entertainment journalist Brent Simon is a superb parallel parker and sworn enemy to auto-play website videos, as well as a member of the Los Angeles Film Critics Association. You can follow him on Twitter.