Parents’ guide: nudity, sexual situations, adult themes.
If Daniel Burman’s Empty Nest has a special quality, it’s the filmmaker’s ability to take a subject that has been dramatized to death and approach it with a gentle touch that helps make the story’s point with oddball humour instead of long, bleak pages of earnest dialogue.
Burman’s leisurely paced piece finds the 35-year-old Argentinian writer and director imagining what life for his generation will be like in another 20 years. In an interview promoting its release, he said the film is largely about “accepting one’s own decline.”
That’s the prospect confronting author Leonardo (Oscar Martinez) and his wife, Martha (Cecilia Roth of Pedro Almodóvar’s All About My Mother) as they face life together after the last of their children marries and leaves Buenos Aires. With Martha throwing herself into studying for the degree she never completed, Leonardo approaches the empty-nest syndrome by living a vivid fantasy life – so vivid, in fact, that the line between his imagined encounters, mostly with women, is blurring into his everyday reality.
At one point, Leonardo’s friend Dr. Spivack (Arturo Goetz) tells him about a condition in which aging people experience a fantasy so intensely that they actually believe it happened.
In all this confusion, nothing is telegraphed to the viewer. While some things that happen to Leonardo are clearly imagined, others might be true and still others manifest themselves as fantasies only after a while. All the while, one wonders about the reality of certain characters. Surreal? To a fault, perhaps.
Burman, often cited as a key member of the New Argentine Cinema, said fantasy worlds “provide the only palliative for the inevitable failure of being alive.
“Whenever I read a magazine and I see people linked to the word ‘success,’ I think to myself ‘What success, if we’re all going to die anyway?’ ” he said in the promotion interview.
Woody Allen, to whom Burman has resisted comparisons, would say the same thing. But Empty Nest – for all its occasional tendencies toward self-indulgence – ultimately makes its point by its own rules.
