Szifron: Relatos Salvajes (Wild Tales) (2014)

If Damon Szifron's Wild Tales and Miguel Gomes’ Arabian Nights trilogy are anything to go by, directors are responding to the current economic unrest across the Hispanic world with a greater will to storytelling than ever, prompting a return to anthology film-making as an anti-austerity measure. However, whereas Gomes’ trilogy is deliberately loose, inefficient and uneconomical, Wild Tales offers something much tauter – a series of six sequential revenge stories that each feels like a brilliant thriller boiled down to its most suspenseful moments. Given that suspense itself is something of an austere pursuit – a deliberate paring back of sensory resources – Wild Tales also feels less overtly fantastic than Arabian Nights, and more about tapping into the quickened pulse of contemporary Argentina, a pulse that would presumably be unavailable or less perceptible in the full-length version of any of these perfectly truncated films. As a result, most of the stories here revolve around disenfranchised members of the Argentinian working class brought up against the bastions of aristocratic-corporate wealth. Yet for all the power of these allegorical fragments, it feels as if suspense itself is very much the subject matter of the film, as Szifron spends more and more time on each segment – the first is only ten minutes – while simultaneously amping up the tension, taking us from veritable Hitchcockian abstractions – diagrams more than films – to more fully-fleshed out characters and scenarios. Given that suspense tends to warp and intensify time, that has the effect of making the films feel shorter and shorter even as they increase in length - the temporal equivalent of a dolly zoom – resulting in an absurd, hallucinatory sense of time, a series of ever more intensive crises, climaxes and catastrophes that nevertheless fall short of catharsis until the final stunning segment, and even then don’t quite provide you with the reprieve you’re anticipating. In fact, so absurd is this sense of quotidian crisis that it segues almost imperceptibly into black comedy as the film proceeds, until every suspenseful moment is comic and every comic moment is somewhat suspenseful. Not only does that create an amazing, seamless synergy between the stories – if it doesn’t quite feel like one story, it certainly syncs into a day-in-the-life vision in the vein of The Naked City – but it imbues the film with an incredible, improvisational resilience, a grim determination to wrest pleasure, moment to moment, from even the most unbearably hostile experiences. More than a will to storytelling, then, there is a will to fun here, albeit a delirious, deranged, manic sense of fun, as Szifron invites you to party like there's nothing left to lose, taking revenge on austerity by getting off on austerity.