A lower-class suburb of Buenos Aires. For years an underground lottery business has operated out of this dead end street of identical houses, following the death of her father and figurehead Hugo (Hugo Felpeto), daughter Maribel (Maribel Felpeto) takes charge with mother Alejandra (Alejandra Cánepa).
Now it is thriving, with Maribel employing several clerks to record bets. However, things have become tense recently. Word is that the police have been raiding similar operations (albeit with some warning), and so Maribel and Alejandra are trying to sort things out. That includes dealing with Hugo’s secret money accounts. But after hacking into her late father’s computer and Facebook account, Maribel uncovers a deep secret which upends everything she knows about her family a secret she will investigate with friend Juliana (Juliana Inae Risso).
Something Old, Something New, Something Borrowed (Algo viejo, algo nuevo, algo prestado) is the third feature from Hernán Rosselli an Argentinian filmmaker who is also a professor and runs film publication Las Naves. The concept here is ingenious: Maribel Felpeto was Rosselli’s real-life childhood neighbour who provided him with old family videos shot by Hugo; she also agreed to star in the resulting film he made alongside the rest of her family. It’s fascinating context, but the writer/co-editor/director has used this old footage of Hugo and Alejandra from the ‘80s and ‘90s in an intriguing way.
It’s storytelling as double exposure: when this footage plays, Mirablel reflects on her family history in voiceover how young Alejandra met and fell for courier come bookie Hugo; how he told her his job at first but soon realised he couldn’t keep up without involving her; then through their wedding day (on which another figure may have died at his hands) and Mirabel’s early childhood to him becoming head of this lotto empire.
The closest reference point would be Alonso Ruizpalacios’ A Cop Movie a police drama, documentary and featurette all in one. And like that film, Something Old frequently blurs the lines between reality and fiction. There are also flickers of a mafia movie. The way Alejandra runs this operation with Mirabel and her trusted group is don-like, as she threatens those who step into their territory; but the Sopranos or Goodfellas comparisons make more sense when they’re around each other celebrating birthdays together, eating sushi together, the usual. This camaraderie becomes a big part of the film’s natural realist tone, too, seen in conversations (and how in nightclub scenes they’re drowned out by loud music).
Just as important for the realism of Something Old is the way that these moments are caught in still and compact frames. Occasionally, a shot will zero in on one person in a medium close-up. Most often, though, the camera is watching these people like a fly on the wall. Plus, various kinds of images are adopted by Rosselli and Joaquin Neira (credited as cinematographer alongside Hugo Felpeto). Alongside the home movies, there’s security camera footage from multiple angles; 360° shots; even a shot of an X-ray scanner. Rosselli clearly loves showing his film through different lenses. Sometimes literally – one scene starts and ends with a fish-eye lens from a bird’s eye view.
It wears thin eventually, this realism in Something Old. While its naturalism of the mundane immerses you to an extent, there also isn’t much to a plot that seems to repeat itself at points. Coupled with the slow burn pace, it means that it fizzles out over time. But though light in terms of narrative, this story is dense everywhere else. Take the soundscape, where over blippy electric versions of Johann Sebastian Bach’s compositions we have lotto numbers being repeated by different people; add that to the imagery and you get an idea of how Rosselli makes this movie unique.
Something Old, Something New, Something Borrowed is worth your time for how it bends and warps context around real footage within documentary form to interrogate technology and memory. The bookmaker world is full of old technology dial-up modems screech into life every time someone logs onto their computer; VHS camcorders captured all those home movies but none more so than Maribel’s family unit itself: “We were the first ones in our neighbourhood to get one,” she says in voiceover early on about their VHS player; “I can watch my family when they were still alive.” But that has a dark side too.
Maribel recalls what her grandmother once said to her father, who didn’t like talking about the past: “Never retrace your steps; you could burn your feet and never be able to walk again.” The past can burn you in Something Old. Memories can bring up painful emotions and truths and technology can rekindle them.
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