Rotten Link, The (2015)
Howard Gorman
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Starring Paula Brasca, Luis Ziembrowski, Marilu Marini
Directed by Valentín Javier Diment
Whilst last year’s It Follows served up some chillingly potent propaganda advocating sexual sobriety, Argentina’s latest genre offering, The Rotten Link, divulges in all manner of sexual debaucheries to further reinforce the notion that it’s probably wise to keep one’s pecker in one’s pants.
Writer/director Valentín Javier Diment goes brashly against the grain, tapping into the pneuma of an isolated township to take his audience on an unflinching journey into the abyss of cultural taboos. And what better place to portray this than in the seemingly peaceful backdrop of El Escondido – a disturbingly dysfunctional community, bereft of legal constraints?
Despite a lewd sounding premise, Diment never falls back on smutty schemings. That’s clearly not his modus operandi: He’s much more interested in setting a controlled pace to give his characters all the room in the world to breathe and flourish. This deliberate pacing might find some less patient viewers feeling fidgety, but it’s the unhealthy relationships and erotically-charged emotions Diment toys with that maketh this movie. Having said that, even if slow-burners don’t tend to light your cinematic candle, you should still give this a try, safe in the knowledge that, despite the sardonically bleak portrait it paints, The Rotten Link packs in a torrent of inspired pitch-black comedy moments that really pep things up. Likewise, a folksy guitar score performed by actual characters featuring in the film is an inspired touch, adding some welcome mirth and vitality to the proceedings.
The film’s biggest redeeming quality is by far its stainless cast, particularly the central, idiosyncratic family: the waning tyrannical mother, Ercilia (Marini), stricken with memory lapses, who watches over her two children, Roberta (Brasca), the prostitute everyone lusts for, and her brother, the mentally impaired woodcutter Raulo (Ziembrowski). The siblings are such a convincing pairing that a certain incestuous moment borders on the unbearable once we get there.
In terms of the narrative, it’s hard not to trespass in spoiler territory, but in short, Ercilia gets a gut feeling she won’t be around to fend for her kids much longer and warns Roberta not to sleep with every last male in the community so as not to lose her “purity.” It won’t take a genius to imagine what that leads up to, particularly when one certain pushy customer, Sicilio, refuses to take no for an answer, but by far does it end there, and as mentioned, the film tackles the taboo to outstrip all taboos: incest. The audience endures this particularly uncomfortable moment of intimacy before things take yet another unexpected turn and the brother’s bottled-up torment is uncorked as Diment ditches his calmer cadence in favor of a frantically-paced kamikaze killing spree.
Exactly what dark place Diment and his co-writers were coming from when they wrote this script still silently flummoxes me, but The Rotten Link does a superb job of emphasizing how life’s turmoil, not mental disabilities or madness, can lead even the most decent of people far astray from the moral path when pushed a bridge too far.
It’s disturbing, it’s lewd, it’s even absurdly funny, and it depicts society at its most toxic; and for most of those reasons it likely won’t resonate with many. That would be a real shame, though, as Diment’s respectful approach to such dark and deplorable subject matter, coupled with the fact the film revels in its own rashness and absolute unconventionality, is what makes it all the more appealing. For all its bleakness and malevolence, The Rotten Link is anything but rotten. It is, in fact, an absolute treat.
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Film
Categorized:Reviews
