Toublanc
(Toublanc)

After Gustavo Fontan’s The Real Lemon Tree (Jury’s special mention) presented in last year’s competition, Toublanc, the new feature of the very productive Iván Fund, again encounters the realm of the great Argentine author Juan José Saer. On the surface, it portrays two totally disconnected stories, as their main characters, Inspector Toublanc (Nicolas Azalbert) and the solitary Argentine French teacher Clara (Maricel Alvarez), do not know each other and live their lives thousands of miles apart. Yet this distance is relativised by the mise-en-scène, which ineffably builds up the intensities of their presence in landscapes of little note (whatever these may be). They appear like travellers in continual transit. By transcending the commonplace dimension of reality filmed in its most prosaic quotidian, Toublanc uncovers the most tenuously fictional aspects of our lives. Reality will always be a garment that is far too large for us to inhabit it. JB