★★★★Nothing is harder than comedy. Comedy, which is the blatantly fake, requires a strange balance to make us smile and the ridiculous to become believable—and unbelievable at the same time. There are few filmmakers who understand the mechanisms of comedy, and even less so in a country as dilettante in its cinema as Argentina. Ariel Winograd is one of them and this story of a man who must go in search of the real father of whom he thought his son was (a road movie, an odd couple movie, a family comedy, a social satire, a muted melodrama) requires for the juggler to hold many elements in the air at the same time. Winograd understands something that many do not: how long an image has to last for it to cause us what it should. And to that is added that he knows how to direct actors. Thus, he manages to make Sbaraglia, who is usually intense on screen, do his best and hardest work here: an ordinary guy (the biggest challenge for an actor is that) who convinces us of his existence. And if WC Fields said that one should not work with dogs or children, Benjamín Otero’s work is an exception: there really is a perfect game between the child and the adult; one shines thanks to the other. Today it’s fixed… it shows that to reach tenderness you don’t need a cheap shot, just believe on the screen.
