Article by Alessandro Pomati.

Translation by Alessandra Rapone.

An informer for the armed wing of the Argentine dictatorship in 1978, called Ulrich, works with images: photographic images or those created by amateur film cameras. This may be a didactic detail, since the way the director Emiliano Serra (in his first fiction feature film) ‘uses’ his main character, in particular the way he captures and defines him in the writing, makes him, in turn, a ‘camera’: the narrative proceeds only when he is present, and the viewer sees and hears only what Ulrich sees and hears. Furthermore, the impassivity of the protagonist’s face (played by Gabriel Rosas) and the monochord setting of his voice, able to read both a confidential report and an article about the upcoming football World Cup with the same intonation, emphasize the idea of a coldness that only a machine or an inanimate object could have. The eyes, not surprisingly, are the only expressive feature.

So Corresponsal shapes up as a small-essay film on the point of view and subjectivity. From this perspective, the tailing of a professor suspected of being involved in subversive activities, which leads to tragedy and guilt (a sort of The Conformist by Bertolucci transposed to the time of the Argentine military junta), and other melodramatic twists add little or nothing to a film that perhaps could have taken more stylistic risks. However, Corresponsal succeeds in questioning History and its gaze, a gaze that is not less impassive than that of its protagonist.