Tribeca 2005 Review: PLAY

Play, the first feature by Chilean-born, Chicago-educated Alicia Scherson, is a magical realist puzzle of near-miss, class-crossed love. Though it might draw comparisons to Y Tu Mama Tambien or Amores Perros as an emblem of the New Spanish-Language Cinema, it’s really more like early Almodovar, but toned down to invite contemplation. And there’s a lot here to contemplate: Play is packed with warring ruminations on the role cities play in the way we define class and industry, intimacy and isolation. What’s most remarkable is the fact that these Big Ideas are contained in what could only be called a Post-Playstation cinematic style.

Shot on I-can’t-believe-it’s-not-film HD, Play works its modern-city-as-Legoland project hard, but it would be impossible to say that Scherson’s enthusiasm for her structuring metaphor isn’t infectious. The thread-bare plot allows for much stylistic embroidery: Cristina (Viviana Herrera), a quietly beautiful, eccentric 20-something from the poor rural south, is living in Santiago and working as an in-home caretaker to an older European man. Cristina wanders Santiago’s video arcades the way Monica Vitti somnambulated through Antonioni’s Italy: eyes wide-open, seeing and absorbing everything, but touching nothing. She's hungry for experience but has no clue how to obtain it.

One morning Cristina finds a briefcase in a trashcan, and all-too-eagerly allows its contents to transform her life and world into a living video game of surveillance and subliminal seduction. Her unwitting opponent in this game is Tristan (Andres Ulloa), a 30-something construction supervisor left devastated by his girlfriend Irene's announcement that she wants him to move out. Moping home from work the evening after the blow-off, Tristan loses his briefcase, but is far from sad to see its contents go.

Girlfriend-less (and thus splashy modern home-less), and unshackled by the identity contained within his briefcase, Tristan has free reign to regress into full-time self-pity. Scherson's camera absolutely adores Ulloa who, with his doe eyes and angled face marking him as a grown-up Gael Garcia Bernal, wears the inherent romance of depression extremely well. Rolling around in bed, sniffing Irene's forgotten tank top after her departure, his Tristan comes off as a depression addict, a man who has been desperately missing the comfort of being sad.

As Tristan pursues a severe kind of nothingness, Christina pursues him. She follows him around town, wearing his Ipod, chain smoking his cigarettes, sneaking into his ex-house to pee in his ex-toilet and wear hix ex-girlfriend's clothes. Scherson steers their lives to run parallel but, miraculously, draws out their metaphysical foreplay to the narrative’s end. Cristina’s less trying to get into Tristan’s pants than trying to get into his head, but either pursuit loses its fun as soon as anyone else can spot the game. She succeeds to the point where, when they do meet, his recognition of her is instant and intimate, as if she was his creation and not the other way around.

Play works, at times, in spite of itself; its few unsuccessful set pieces can be rationalized as the logical sputters of a film that dares to dote on its sometimes-irrational, sometimes even borderline-psychotic characters. I was immediately drawn in by it and remain in its favor, but I’m aware that its special brand of magical realism could require a patience-trying leap. Still, though it lacks an easy-sell hook like the violence of Perros or the threesomes of Y Tu, I think it could potentially make the same kind of crossover.