3 - The Old New Tricks: Re-engaging the Middle Class

Summary

In the period between 1999 and 2005, a time of immense tension and contradiction in Argentine society, several genre films addressed the local crisis. A few crime stories and melodramas referred more or less explicitly to the effect of the economic crunch on culture, class and gender identity. As they did so they established themselves as ‘mediators’ between private sensibilities and public history. Despite receiving mixed local reviews, they won audiences both at home and abroad. In contrast to films such as Bolivia, La ciénaga and El bonaerense, analysed in Chapter 2, genre films tended to focus on the better-off middle class – rather than the social struggles of the working class, the socially marginal or ethnic minorities. By taking a less confrontational approach, genre films were able to mediate the experience of many local middle-class viewers who went to the movies to see their own struggles represented on the big screen. The analysis to follow will focus in particular on Fabián Bielinsky's Nueve reinas (Nine Queens, 2000) and El aura (The Aura, 2005), and Juan José Campanella's trilogy El mismo amor, la misma lluvia (Same Love, Same Rain, 1999), El hijo de la novia (Son of the Bride, 2001) and Luna de Avellaneda (Avellaneda's Moon, 2004). Their emphasis on the local middle class, together with their embrace of conventional film tropes, aided these filmmakers in reaching a wide domestic audience and an enthusiastic overseas market.

In what follows, several considerations are made regarding the middle class as historical actor in Argentina and the potential of film to construct local narratives capable of crossing cultures and borders. Particular emphasis is placed on the role played by conventional narrative strategies in mediating present and past experience with public history, bringing forward a more positive way of understanding ‘nostalgia’, a concept that film and cultural critics too often associate with conventional narratives, though rarely analyse in detail. After the analysis of Bielinsky's and Campanella's films, the chapter ends with a section on Ricardo Darín, whose stardom came to represent the face and body of Argentine men during the crisis.

A brief introduction to the Argentine middle class

Today it is widely agreed that the 1990s in Argentina marked the completion of a long process that had radically affected the country's social structure and reshaped society's relationship with the state, economy, politics and culture.