This review is part of Honi Soit’s continued coverage of the 71st Sydney Film Festival, 5-16 June. Read the rest of our reviews here.
Following up from the likes of Rojo (2018) from Benjamín Naishtat and A Family Submerged (2018) from María Alché, Puan (2023) screening at the Sydney Film Festival, showed extreme promise as a “philosophical comedy of existential proportions.” Unfortunately, the film moved in too many directions simultaneously and failed to stick the landing on a lot of its humour. While one can appreciate the difficulties in producing comedy which translates across a transnational audience, it was in fact the highly slapstick, practical humour which fell short and let the overall work down.
Puan seems to have many things to say at once about Argentine society, satirising its government and its academics, its journalists and its revolutionaries, and most of all, its elite: Naishtat, in a Q&A following the screening jokingly pleaded for Australia to “trade our elite for yours.”
Yet with seemingly so much to say, the film seems trapped at times in the perspective of Marcelo (Marcelo Subiotto), whose troubles feel repetitive and tedious after the first half hour. Though such a premise seems ripe for a great dry comedy — which the film indeed shows the beginnings of — Puan’s deadpan humour is never given the proper time and space to flourish.
Where this more subtle, poignant humour is promptly smothered, the irritatingly slapstick comedy that shrouds the character of Marcelo seems to be omnipresent. While the placement of such humour seems reasonable as a foil to the protagonists complex philosophical musings, the film rarely pulls off such a contrast, coming off more often than not as trying too hard to be funny. These musings of Marcelo too, seem underdeveloped. We are introduced to the course he currently teaches — classic political philosophy — yet little of Marcelo’s actual academic background and philosophical beliefs are eked out of this introduction. His most interesting aspect as a character — the contradiction of an old-fashioned lecturer of Hobbes who secretly harbours progressive fervour — is one that sadly sees little exploration.
What seems to take away from the humour, most of all, is the lack of a political backbone. Even a generic or misguided politics could have greatly enriched the film, so long as it was cohesive and understood itself. Yet it feels hard at times to identify anything Puan believes in at all.
For the first half of the film, I was actually enraptured by this aspect; looking through the perspective of a disconnected academic in his ivory tower, it made sense for Argentina’s political situation to appear anarchic and absurd.
In spite of the crumbling political and economic institutions of the film’s world, the focus on a petty rivalry between philosophers read as an astute observation on the nature of academia divorced from politics and philosophy divorced from practice. In one particular scene, in which Marcelo eats in a restaurant, we are suddenly subject to a loud, rumbling demonstration that moves past outside, as the shutters are quickly closed and Marcelo sits eating in darkness, blocking out light as political reality.
However, as the film further unravels, the believability of such a reading becomes tenuous. I was left feeling disappointed that what seemed an interesting and highly original commentary on liberalism, class and myopia had devolved into a convoluted show of platitudes and empty signifiers for political radicalism. The ending felt particularly superficial in its one-dimensional use of protest as a prop through which the protagonist immediately emerges from their existential crisis, a fanciful and shallow understanding of civil unrest at best.
Puan clearly has a finger to the pulse of Argentina’s dynamic political and economic throes; as solemnly noted by Naishtat, it accidentally predicted both Javier Milei’s election and subsequent economic disaster. Yet, what it actually has to say politically and philosophically becomes both too complicated and not complicated enough.
While I am still certainly excited for what more works Benjamín Naishtat and María Alché bring to the table as some of Argentina’s finest contemporary directors, Puan felt like a swing and a miss with the potential to be so much more.
