Parapalos

The winner of the top jury prize in last year’s Buenos Aires Festival Internacional de Cine Independiente, Ana Poliak’s third feature is a rarity among rarities – a thoroughly honest movie about work. A kid from the provinces (Adrián Suárez) who has come to the outskirts of Buenos Aires to live with his cousin finds a job as a ‘parapalos’, or pin boy, in one of the last manually-operated bowling alleys in the city (make that the world). Adrián at work, Adrián at home: that’s the movie. And what a movie it is – so wondrously quiet and contemplative; so minimal in form, yet so rich in observation; so impossibly delicate. And finally, so poetic – unassumingly so. Poliak’s images and sounds are completely taken from the immediate environment – the echo within the bowling alley, the wooden pins stacked and restacked on the floor, and the faces and voices of the old men, the lifers, who give Adrián an impromptu education. From deep within its small framework, Parapalos looks out at the expanse of life, a life of possibility ahead for Adrián and a life of hardened experience behind for Daniel, Turco and El Nippur, his co-workers at the alley with whom he shares a fleeting camaraderie. A film of quiet force and handmade beauty. (KJ)