El zapato chino

Shot clandestinely on a shoestring budget, the second feature by prolific filmmaker and theorist Cristián Sánchez bears an uncanny, yet ultimately only vague resemblance to TAXI DRIVER (1976) with its story of a cabbie who spontaneously rescues a young woman from a brothel only to develop an obsessive, yet platonic love for her. By keeping all violence and sexuality deliberately off-screen, Sánchez structures his film as a darkly absurdist fable of desire anxiously displaced and never to be realised. Making radical use of voiceover to fracture time and grant an interiority to characters that often seen impervious to conventional reason, Sánchez channels the spirit of Buñuel and Kafa to sufuse EL ZAPATO CHINO with a sense of inertia that renders the everyday paranoia and fear of life under dictatorship vivid and strange. The furtive qualities of Sánchez’s characters and narrative is given a further charge by the film’s unreal documentary images of Santiago as a hauntingly empty city, which also have the same uncanny aura of a crime scene that Walter Benjamin used to describe Eugène Atget’s photographs of Paris. (Haden Guest)

In the presence of Valeria Sarmiento.

With UN SUEÑO COMO DE COLORES.

Cristián Sánchez: VÍAS PARALELAS (1975), FELISA GONZÁLEZ IN SUSANA (1978, K), LOS DESEOS CONCEBIDOS (1982), EL OTRO ROUND (1984), EL CUMPLIMIENTO DEL DESEO (1994), CUÍDATE DEL AGUA MANSA (1995), CAUTIVERIO FELIZ (1998), CAMINO DE SANGRE (2003), TIEMPOS MALOS (2008), LA PROMESA DEL RETORNO (2020), DATE UNA VUELTA EN EL AIRE (2020)