★★★★ In the Argentine imaginary, a building manager is someone who is trusted, but with limits; who is believed, but not entirely. Based on this idea, Guillermo Francella’s Eliseo (a character called to be a peak in his career), a duplicitous manipulator, perverse and noble at times, always selfish, becomes that rare avis of fiction: a fantastic being emerged and sustained by the everyday. There is in the episodes of “The Manager”, ironic humor, acid, annoying. We can happily see each outrage of this man who feels king of his building and is about to be stripped, but at the end of each chapter we are left with an acid taste, a bit of poison. Thanks to the surgeons’ gaze of the Cohn-Duprat duo, Francella combines these two faces here (the popular comedian, the sinister character). “El Encargado” is absolutely Argentine, but it goes further: an album of moral flaws at which there is nothing left but to laugh.
