★★★ It is always welcome to find a national author’s work on the commercial billboard. Especially when it comes to a classic written by the prestigious Argentine writer, author, short story writer, screenwriter and playwright Julio Mauricio (1919 – 1991). A profound connoisseur of the human spirit, he was also a notable dialogue speaker, as he demonstrated in more than ten plays. Among them are “La valija”, on which the film of the same name, directed by Enrique Carreras, starring Luis Sandrini and Malvina Pastorino, was based. It was 1971 and it was, neither more nor less, the relationship of a married couple who decided to divorce, worn out by years of living together.
In 1982, in the throes of the last military dictatorship, he premiered “El enganche”, another valuable sample of the links that can be generated between different people, with performances by Mirta Busnelli and Rudy Chernicoff. Other versions would come later with Leonor Manso and Carlos Carella, directed by Héctor Tealdi, Linda Peretz and Ulises Dumont, guided by Manso and several more with different actors and actresses.
The story is that of two losers: Diego Federico Rivero, Insaurralde on his mother’s side (Arnaldo André) and Carmen Acosta (Miriam Lanzoni). He is a salesman for a real estate company and she sporadically cleans houses, but since he does not manage to pay the pension she lives on with the little he earns, he must practice the “oldest trade in the world”; usual euphemism to define prostitution.
They meet at a bus stop and move to a hotel room for hours with the intention of having sex, although the desire will not materialize. Forced to confinement, by a police search, they will bare their souls and we will know their life stories. As a child, she suffered the abandonment of her mother. He is a bachelor who reached 73 years of age, unable to complete transactions and frustrated, only looking for a night of fleeting company. In just over an hour, topics such as religion, devotion to the Virgin, loneliness, the oppression of power and fear of the future, among others, appear. Always with a hint of humor mixed with melancholy, it is an exact x-ray of the Buenos Aires idiosyncrasy.
As director, the popular actor Osvaldo Laport, takes advantage of the almost stripped-down setting to highlight the loneliness of the characters and correctly handles these helpless creatures. André and Lanzoni provide the presence and exact nuances of these defenseless beings in the face of the alienation of everyday life.
