Cannes. Hamaca Paraguaya.

Lee Marshall reviews Hamaca Paraguaya for Screen Daily: "With a Cannes appearance (in Un Certain Regard) that makes it the first Paraguayan film to screen in the official selection of a major festival - and the only Paraguayan feature shot on 35mm in the last 30 years - Hamaca Paraguaya will delight those self-flagellating cineastes who believe, like the albino monk in The Da Vinci Code, that 'pain is good.'"

Manohla Dargis in the New York Times: "Watching this attractive exercise, which unfolds with great deliberation and without a single camera movement, I was again reminded that art-house cinema has as many of its own clichés and narrative tropes as Hollywood does."

Deborah Young in Variety: "Its roots are clearly in the rigorous approach of new Argentine cinema, but it lacks the heart and soul of an apparently simple tale like Lisandro Alonso's electrifying Los muertos, which it recalls."

Duane Byrge in the Hollywood Reporter calls it "a cinematic bust. Thematically ambitious, it also is aesthetically primitive."

Update, 5/20: "As a series of striking, static compositions play across the screen, a voiceover narration that switches from the man to the woman and back again takes us into the characters' shared past, until after scarcely more than an hour of screen time, we're left with a rich sense of these ordinary people and their quiet dignity," writes Scott Foundas. "Admittedly, not much else happens in Encina's minimalist and exceptionally delicate work, which quickly generated comparisons (not all of them favorable) to everything from Samuel Beckett to the recent films of Gus Van Sant. But the 35-year-old Encina possesses a poetic sensibility that is uniquely her own and which, luck willing, will soon be seen again."

Posted by dwhudson at May 19, 2006 11:03 AM