Liverpool

EXCLUSIVE LIMITED RUN!  ► The director of festival staples and critical favourites La Libertad, Los Muertos, and Fantasma, Buenos Aires-born Lisandro Alonso is — like Lucrecia Martel, whose The Headless Woman also screens at Pacific Cinémathèque December 18, 19 & 20 — one of the leading luminaries of a recent renaissance in Argentine cinema. The enigmatically titled Liverpool, Alonso’s masterful fourth feature, is a work of rare grace and restrained grandeur. A solitary, taciturn, alcoholic man, played by non-professional Juan Fernandez, takes leave from his grim job on a merchant freighter and journeys across the desolate, snowy landscapes of Tierra del Fuego to visit the family he apparently abandoned years before. The motif of an isolated, emotionally closed-off man navigating the remote wilderness is an Alonso signature. The film is beautifully rendered in Alonso’s rigorous, elegant trademark style — precise compositions, languid long takes, sparse dialogue, a slow, allusive, anti-dramatic accretion of detail and narrative information – but adds new emotional and psychological amplitude to his work. “An enigmatic masterpiece . . . Liverpool’s revelatory final shot — in which an object akin to Citizen Kane’s Rosebud is presented for our contemplation — adds one last mysterious layer” (Keith Uhlich, Time Out New York ). Colour, 35mm. 84 mins.