I Want My MOMMY

At the end of another very good month here in Buenos Aires, but last night proved, yet again, that I haven't quite gotten the hang of what I can only call porteño chutzpah.

My friends Galo and Emiliano suggested we check out a French film that was a big hit at Cannes (won a prize of some sort) called Mommy. It's playing as part of a Cannes festival week here at the national cinema (where tickets are always 8 pesos—about a buck).

I ask Galo when we should arrive, since events of this sort sell out way early in NYC, and he says around quarter to eight for an 8:00 screening would be fine. I live very nearby and decide to stop by early, just in case. Get there around 6:45 and it's already sold out.

Game over, right? Not here.

In NY, you could wait around and try to buy tickets from scalpers, but that's not a local custom. Galo and Emiliano show up (predictably late, around 7:50) and I tell them it's a no go. But instead of leaving to go have a pizza, we just mill around in front of the movie theater. Then we sort of push our way inside to the lobby.

There are two box offices, one regular, one for press. Emiliano chats up the teller at the press box office to see if Galo's credentials as a worker at the Teatro San Martin (national theater) will help. They don't. But still, we don't go. We just push our way into a sort of semi-controlled mob with a bunch of other locals near the ticket-takers, who take this completely in stride, asking us once, quite politely, to make way for people who have tickets.

Around 8:10 they decide what-the-hell and just start handing out tickets. We push our way toward the front of the group and we're in. Gracias, Galo y Emiliano. (In the local mindset, it's very important to the ticket-takers they they give us tickets and then take it seconds later, rather than just letting us go in. Never mind that we didn't pay, and really just pushed our way in, so long as we actually have a ticket to give them, we're OK.)

Oh, by the way, turns out the front three rows of the movie theater (which is very big) are nearly empty.

So we saw Mommy, which turns out to be quite good, by a French-Canadian prodigy named Xavier Dolan, who's 25 and already made 5 films. It's a bit too long, and maybe schematic, but harrowing, exciting acting, and energetic, vivid filmmaking. (Galo and Emiliano have seen all of his films and prefer some of the others to this one.)