I DON'T WANT TO TALK ABOUT IT
A film review by Eric Mankin
Copyright 1994 Eric Mankin
The translation of the title doesn't convey the stuffiness of the original. DE ESO NO SE HABLA is more, "THAT IS NOT DISCUSSED." The reference is to the airtight hypocrisy of the seaside Argentine town that is the setting of this astringent tale by director Maria Luisa Bemberg.
It is the early 1930s: the formidable widow Leonor (Luisina Brando) refuses to accept the fact that her daughter Charlotte (Alejandra Podesta) is a dwarf. On one level, she's Mrs. Gump of the pampas--"Short is as short does"--but in Bemberg's film the mother's refusal merges serenely into a municipality-wide structure of denial. Everyone in the town systematically avoids discussion of all unpleasant truths, from the mayor's idiocy to the existence of the brothel where the entire male population spends every night drinking, whoring, gambling and listening to scratchily recorded Carlos Gardel tangos. The agreement not to communicate is only disturbed when Ludovico D'Andrea (Marcello Mastroianni) an emigre Italian who is the only cultured or imaginative man in the town, falls in love with Charlotte.
Mastroianni is perfectly cast as the silver-tongued, gallant and rueful expatriate Don Ludovico. His presence and the richly detailed, knowingly satiric period provincial setting both recall Fellini, but the style is very much Bemberg's own. The story, narrated by the voice of an outsider whose identity is one of the film's better revelations, has a slippery rhythm as catchy and pungent as one of Gardel's plaintive hymns to love as screwy masculine self-absorption, love in which the love object is nearly irrelevant. Bemberg treats Don Ludovico with affection, but doesn't let her affection for him spoil her fun.
Eric Mankin
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