Paraguayan Hammock.

"While gore-fests may get the most attention in the realm of horror films, perhaps not enough is given to that darkness of art-house cinema, the secret repose for the most suggestive kind of horror: the ghost story," writes Daniel Kasman in the Auteurs' Notebook. "Paz Encina's New Crowned Hope entry, Hamaca paraguaya (Paraguayan Hammock) is an excellent example, where-in what is nominally dubbed a pretentious or at the very least plodding aesthetic and focus is really just looking at the same picture the wrong way.... [H]aunted by what's not there, we are always hoping that which is missing will appear, that which is longed for will be relieved."

"Encina's script is a beautifully written and considered immersion into the humdrum of campesino life, reminiscent of the psychological minutia Reinaldo Arenas brought to the first two novels of his Pentagonia, Singing from the Well and The Palace of the White Skunks, in which adults are always obsessing about food, weather, tradition, country and the gods above," writes Ed Gonzalez in Slant. "Both Arenas and Encina thrive on repetition, but Encina is not a phatasmagoric artist: More sobering than Arenas, she tells Paraguayan Hammock not from the wild and crazed point of view of a child tormented by - and in awe of - the adult world just beyond his reach but from the less nuanced and objective vantage point of an outsider."

"A few weeks ago, I received a letter from a Jungian psychiatrist, who took me to task for failing to enter into the world of Michael Haneke's Funny Games," writes J Hoberman in the Voice. "But for me, a movie is an object in the world and not a virtual reality - and even if I do 'enter' one, it's with an appreciation of that world as a construction. In this sense, Paraguayan Hammock is an exemplary film object. It's impossible to watch Encino's movie without grasping how it was made, although this isn't to say that its simplicity precludes emotion or even suspense. On the contrary."

"Paz Encina does wondrous things in an overly familiar style of international art-house formalism: long, fixed takes of carefully arranged scenes; the meticulous orchestration of environmental noises; an oblique handling of character and continuity." Nathan Lee in the New York Times.

"Maybe the most mesmerizing effect is the abstracted yet intimate sound design of the couple's conversations," writes Nicolas Rapold in the New York Sun. "Closely miked and slightly delayed, they sound like internal monologues, and sharp eyes will notice early on that the performers do not even appear to be talking (indeed, other actors were dubbed). It's as if their loving concerns about their son's return lie so close to heart that they hardly even need to be voiced: They're thinking about it all the time, turned inward even during their daily routines."

At Anthology Film Archives, today through May 20.

Earlier: First impressions from Cannes 06.

Posted by dwhudson at May 14, 2008 1:36 AM