Lost Embrace
Picture: C+
Sound: C+ Extras: C Film: B-
Daniel Burman’s Lost Embrace (2003) wants to be a
portrait of Buenos Aires’ Jewish community and has its moments, but the
segmentation of the film that may try to mirror the segmentation of consumerism
via the entity of the shopping mall backfires and the result is a
sometimes-choppy presentation that gets in the way of the quirkiness and story
that is here. I will blame the
influence of Dogme ’95, but the story overcomes the choppiness just enough to
bear it all.
Ariel (Daniel Hendler) is busy helping women in and out of
clothes at his fun mall job and is not interested at this time in a serious
relationship. As a matter of fact, he
wants to leave the community in general and travel all over the world, but his
father Elias (Jorge D’Elia) is on the way back after leaving him years before
during the Yom Kippur war that did not work out the way Golda Meir had hoped
for. Though the results are not bad,
there are still things that are not as thoroughly covered as one might have
liked, especially after so many feature films we have been made about the
Jewish Experience worldwide. It is
still worth a look.
The anamorphically enhanced 1.78 X 1 image is on the soft
side, with cinematography by Ramiro Civita, A.D.F., falls somewhere between the
standard work of a drama and on the spot feel of a documentary, but the title
cards chop up the work and that works against the film more than helping
it. The Dolby Digital 2.0 Stereo has no
Pro Logic surrounds, but the Spanish is clean and clear enough. This was a Dolby Digital release, so why no
surrounds, we don’t know. Extras
include a trailer for this and a few other New Yorker DVDs, plus a featurette
about the production of this film.
- Nicholas Sheffo
