Most of the movies selected for the Criterion Channel’s collection of Argentine Noir feel like a dream, or more specifically a nightmare. Drenched in heavy shadows, they’re between real and hallucination. But the 1956 film The Bitter Stems is something of an exception, and no less riveting.
There’s a steady increase of anxiety and tension across its running time, as in the other movies, and a tightening of the screws on the main character. There’s a consistently high level of craftsmanship, too, a precision to set design and framing and lighting as well as acting and writing. But it’s less spectacular than the other noirs, the lighting less expressionistic and heightened.
The story’s about a little man with big dreams. Alfredo Gasper (Carlos Cores) is a hack journalist who meets a fast-talking immigrant, Liudas (Vassili Lambrinos), with an idea for making money. Gasper gets involved in plagiarism and a pyramid scheme; under the spell of Liudas, he’s determined to make money to bring Liudas’ wife and son to Argentina.
But then doubts creep in. Is Liudas telling the truth about his background? Is Gasper being played for a sucker? Bit by bit, hero-worship turns to festering hatred. And Gasper determines to take action.
A series of sharp twists follow, courtesy of director Fernando Ayala and writers Sergio Leonardo and Adolfo Jasca. Of the six movies in the Argentine Noir collection, this is the only one that isn’t based on a story from America or Europe, which may speak to why characters feel so rooted in their specific backgrounds. We learn a lot about Gasper’s family background in particular, and see where he comes from, and it all has to do with who he is and why he does what he does.
There’s a restraint to the imagery in this movie. It’s capable of giving us high-contrast shadow-drenched nighttime scenes with the best of them; the first shots, for example, in which two tense men hurry to catch a train, throw us into a specific emotional frame through atmosphere and lighting. Later there will be violence at night during a power failure, a moment of pitch-darkness chronologically and narratively near the exact center of the movie.
But there’s also a fascination with lived-in spaces, and with places in which work is done. Gasper’s family home is incongruously nice, a place for a boy, not the man he dreams of being. But the pressroom where he works as the film opens is utilitarian, underfunded. Then the offices he and Liudas hire are just the right contrast: dramatic enough to create the impression of a successful firm, a view of a cityscape out the window to remind us of the world in which Gasper dreams of making it big, and also a distinctive difference in brightness between Gasper’s office and the one where Liudas works.
It’s all centered in character, which follows from the story. Bit by bit Gasper’s built up, established dramatically by his actions, and more elliptically by what his co-workers say to him. He’s a man who wants to be great, but also has a need to follow a yet greater man. There’s a displaced focus on his absent father, an abiding sense inside himself that at 32 he’s never proved himself in war the way his father did.
What’s important, since this is a noir story, is that the intense focus on character sets up a strong plot. And it does; Gasper’s extreme actions are based on who he is. Step by step he’s pulled further into his obsessions, and we understand what’s happening without being able to predict where it’s going to go.
Some of the movie’s plot contrivances strain credulity. In particular, there’s an important half-heard conversation early on that’s recontextualized later in the movie. It shouldn’t work, at all, and that it very nearly does is a testament to how well the movie works around it.
At best there’s a sense of inevitability to the movie that has nothing to do with plot, and only indirectly with character. The movie’s almost tragedy, a story about a man who transgresses and is punished. Gasper’s just great enough to suffer from hubris and brought down by hamartia.
Tragic inevitability comes with a price. There’s a lack of weirdness in the movie, an absence of the surreal. There’s a nice dream sequence early on, which mainly serves to give a symbolic dumb-show overview of Gasper’s childhood. That’s a useful bit of the bizarre, enough both to get across the power of childhood loves and terrors, and to sustain the relentless coherence of the rest of the film. Gasper acts logically but is rooted in the irrational, and that makes for a good movie.
Cores is excellent as Gasper, getting across the complexities of the man while also being charismatic enough to carry the picture. Gasper ought to be unwatchable, unlikeable, a blowhard and a self-aggrandizer without a moral compass, just aware enough of his own weakness to be a shit to everyone around him. But Cores makes him fascinating. Also worth noting is Aida Luz, who makes the most of a relatively small part.
The Bitter Stems is a saga of infidelity and death and corruption that’s only relatively realist. But it’s true and credible because of the tightness of its dramatic construction. It’s an impeccably made film.