The Paradise (Argentina, 2022). Address: Fernando Sirianni, Federico Breser. Script and production: Fernando Sirianni. Voices: Norma Aleandro, Nicolás Furtado, Maite Lanata, Jorge Marrale, Alejandro Awada, César Bordón, Mariano Chiesa, Ernesto Larresse. Distributor: Melies Cinematographic. Duration: 103 minutes. Qualification: Sam 16 years old. Our opinion: good.
In his unmissable documentary on the cinema of his country, A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese Through American Movies (1995), Martin Scorsese defines the three genres that he considers to be autochthonous, coming from the very bowels of Hollywood: the western, which emerged from the border; the musical, from Broadway; and the gangster cinema, from the expansion of organized crime at the beginning of the 20th century. Although the gestation of hierarchical and expanded criminal structures was not the exclusive heritage of those times and those thriving cities, it was the exclusive heritage of that young cinema that gestated its iconography and imaginary and then exported them to other territories and other times.
Born from the streets and from the police chronicle, the criminal life of Rosario in the mid-twenties of the 20th century had as its protagonists the Abramovs, a family that led the business of human trafficking to fire and blood and enslaved hundreds of people. of immigrant women in the brothels that carried baptisms as ironic as “Paradise”.
The animated film directed by Fernado Sirianni and Federico Breser picks up that story, and does so in the key of animation, inspired by the series land of ruffians (created in 2017 by Breser himself), and located in the heart of that Santa Fe city disputed by clans and businesses. The coordinates are both those of the gangster film, with its mobsters in berets and cigarettes, the brothels and songs in French, the humid streets and the sound of machine guns, and those of film noir, with its backlit shootouts, the journalist as an impromptu investigator, secrets as the key to revelation. Sirianni and Breser condense that iconography as the meat of a love story, the one that united Ian Abramov and Magdalena Schilko, the same one that put that empire of crime in check.
Paradise (2022), by Fernando Sirianni and Federico Breser.
The animation work achieves a detailed reconstruction of that imaginary, clear and precise, as in moving photographs. What the film never achieves, despite its adult and violent imprint, its carnal approach to those moral conflicts, is to impose its gaze on that artifice, which always resonates with an external umbrella that shelters an indigenous fable. The story evokes in its structure hundreds of gangster films, in its montage ideas iconic resources such as the operatic alternation of The Godfather of Coppola, in its fresh brothel more to the jazz and the song than to the port suburb. But despite that imported air and a certain Manichaeism of the story, The Paradise exudes a genuine love for the genre, a committed work in memory of that tragedy.
Paradise (2022), by Fernando Sirianni and Federico Breser.
From the present of 2000 and guided by the memory of Magdalena, already an old woman in Buenos Aires, the Abramov’s portrait of “Warsaw”, their disputes with the Russians, their sins and betrayals, acquires the plastic style of a forgotten time, of a cursed dream, of a canvas bathed in light and blood. That distancing is the one that best suits the eyes of Sirianni and Breser, more elusive to the historical record and closer to that cinephile fantasy of drawings and shading.
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