‘Puan’ Review: The Personal Gets Political in a Sly, Delightful Argentinian Academia Comedy
variety.comJessica Kiang Anyone familiar with the often disquieting solo work of directors María Alché and Benjamín Naishtat may be put on high uneasiness-alert by the opening scene of “Puan,” their first co-directed feature.
Despite the jaunty pop song playing, an older man going for a morning jog in a scrubby Buenos Aires park, suddenly keels over dead of a heart attack.
Given the surreal griefscape of Alché’s “A Family Submerged” or the sinister tides of Naishtat’s superb “Rojo” (which won best director, actor and cinematography in San Sebastian in 2018), there’s every possibility that the music is a red herring, and the death portends what is to come.
But perhaps that is “Puan”‘s first joke. In fact, Alché and Naishtat seem to have found the experience of writing together in the captivity of lockdown a liberation of a looser, funnier storytelling mode.
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