Arturo a los 30

“There’s no time for a man to recover his hair that grows bald by nature,” says Dromio to his master Antipholus in Shakespeare’s Comedy of Errors. It is perhaps one of the play’s weirdest lines of dialogue. And yet time does indeed keep moving forward (and hair keeps falling out). Martín Shanly’s second feature ARTURO A LOS 30 examines this very idea. Suspended in the latter part of our beloved March of 2020, the titular Arturo tells the tale of the worst day in his life, the date of the wedding of a former friend that took place a few weeks prior. As the story moves forward, memory moves backward: every time a danger arrives (the first of which a car crash), Arturo digresses into another memory (the past). If we think these will be merry recollections, we are wrong. The past is not necessarily better, but it is at least further away. Arturo traverses this beautiful, bittersweet comedy like an upper-middle-class Buster Keaton, clumsily going through life creating nothing but mild wreckages. Slowly we understand that disasters are mostly from afar and that there is an undeclared diference between millennial alienation and actual trauma, a diference that is the source of all the film’s sorrow and all of our chuckles. It also reminds us that perhaps the worst is now behind us. (Lucía Salas)

In the presence of Martín Shanly.