Cornerhouse Digital Reporter Tom Grieve reviews Ni un hombre más…
I watch a lot of foreign cinema, both at Cornerhouse and at home. Mostly though it’s art-house or classic fare – challenging or historically important works that I feel I ought to know. When it comes to comedy, I too often retreat lazily into the easy charms of classic Hollywood or whichever Coen brothers film takes my fancy. I’m nowhere near as adventurous as I should be. Basically, I don’t watch enough films like Ni un hombre más (Iguana Stew); the darkly comic debut film from Argentinian Martin Salimas.
Placed in the middle of the Argentinian jungle near Iguazu falls, the hotel that Charly has been left to take care of doesn’t seem to take too much looking after. With only two guests expected to arrive, the laid-back dreamer can afford to wile away the hours hunting iguanas with his friend. It quickly becomes apparent that Charly knows quite a bit about iguanas. Besides his recipe for a mean lizard stew, he knows what distracts them, why they fight and how they divide their territories.
If you were to ask Charly then he’d probably say that people aren’t too different to the iguanas, with our similar desires, hierarchies and tendency towards easy distraction. His instincts are put to the test when a beautiful woman shows up at the hotel with a dead body in the boot of her car and plenty of money in her handbag, she sets everybody’s animal instincts off –friends, family, lovers and unlucky passers by all get roped into the action. Nothing gets us going like sex, money and murder.
It’s all a bit Faulty Towers in the jungle as the main players try to swindle one other and hide their secrets around the hotel. The remote location, combined with guns, nuns, jealous girlfriends and a middle class couple with a secret, enables plenty of opportunities for writer-director Salimas to engineer jet-black laughs. He revels in bleak, everybody-out-for-themselves farce where the punch lines, more often than not, come courtesy of an additional body.
Ni un hombre más proves to be a perfect, and often very funny, example of what surprises other national cinemas have to offer beyond the usual big art-house festival names. What I’m most looking forward to about Cornerhouse’s Viva Festival is the chance to discover Spanish language features that might not have been on my radar. If you’re planning on coming along then I’ll see you down there.
Ni un hombre más screens as part of ¡Viva! on Tue 18, Sat 22 & Sun 23 March. Book your tickets and watch the trailer here.