Rejtman’s comic masterpiece follows the crisscrossed fortunes of, among others, a cab driver, a rock musician, a flight attendant, and a dog walker with an alarming penchant for over-the-counter medication. The Magic Gloves came out in the wake of Argentina’s devastating financial crisis, and it’s a movie fixated on rotten investments, thin wages, and bad deals. It’s also, despite all that, one of Rejtman’s funniest films, peppered with colorful secondary characters, suffused with a terse, prickly sympathy for its heroes, and alive to the mystery and charm of the modern urban world.

Screening with:

Doli Goes Home
Martín Rejtman, Argentina, 1986, digital projection, 30m
Spanish with English subtitles
Rejtman took a break from his time at NYU to make this half-hour short in Buenos Aires two years after the country’s return to democracy. A nocturnal urban walkabout reminiscent of the films of Chantal Akerman and Jim Jarmusch, Doli Goes Home marked the beginning of Rejtman’s many cinematic reckonings with the pace, atmosphere, and human diversity of Buenos Aires—a city that works, in his first four features, as a character in itself.