Friedrich Nietzsche warned: “Whoever fights monsters must be careful not to become one.” That phrase seems to beat in every shot of “Putas”, the film by Demian Alexander Cirigliano presented at the DAC. There, the abyss is not a metaphor: it is life itself, where desire, need and violence merge until they become a single breath.
Based on her 2018 play of the same name, “Putas” is a sensory and political experience. Six women—Rubí, Alma, Gigi, Amor, Carla and Estrella—compose a choral portrait of prostitution and vulnerability, where the body becomes a mirror and denounces. Cirigliano avoids morbidity and redemption: his camera embodies what Michel Foucault called “the body as a field of power”, a space where biography is written with marks of desire, exploitation and resistance.
Rubí (Esmeralda Miter) poetizes her melancholy between blue and red lights; Alma (Vanesa González) sinks into drugs and the tenderness of a client (Carlos Belloso); Gigi (Carolina Mazzitelli) survives pimping (Roly Serrano); Amor (Florencia Geréz) offers pleasure and dignity to a disabled man (Gerardo Chendo); Carla (Mariana A.), a trans prostitute, faces the fury of her partner (Fabián Vena); and Estrella (Celeste Muriega) is consumed between motherhood, drugs and the night.
Cirigliano’s aesthetics are performative: gesture, body, silence and color are acts of language. In each scene, lighting operates as an emotional grammar: red burns, yellow consoles, black condemns. Diego Frenkel’s music does not accompany; breathes along with the image, making cinema a synesthetic experience. In this fragmentary and sensorial narrative, Gilles Deleuze’s idea about the “time-image” resonates: a cinema that thinks more than it tells.
The film also dialogues with Judith Butler and Julia Kristeva: the abject, the precarious, the expelled. “Putas” does not look from above, but from within. Each story embodies a form of exclusion, but also an affirmation of existence. In that sense, Cirigliano’s work brings into play what Pierre Bourdieu called symbolic capital: the power to transform what is socially despised—the prostituted body—into an object of aesthetic and political reflection.
The performative language of “Putas” turns the gesture into speech: a cigarette, a footwash, or a hug become signs of dignity. There is no easy redemption, but there is humanity. Cirigliano remembers that, as Freud said, desire is a wound and a motor; and that cinema, in its most honest form, is an act of revelation.
In its journey through darkness, “Putas” examines the tension between representation and experience, between speech and body. Its critical power lies on that border: where art does not explain reality, but makes it visible.
By Norma Cabada
