Common Ground (2002) – DVD

Lugares comunes
*½/**** Image A Sound A-
starring Federico Luppi, Mercedes Sampietro, Arturo Puig, Carlos Santamaria
screenplay by Adolfo Aristarain and Kathy Saavedra, based on the novel by Lorenzo F. Aristarain
directed by Adolfo Aristarain

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Watching the paralytically subdued spectacle of Common Ground, I had to wonder: what would my old Latin American Cinema prof make of this film? As he generally had us watching agitprop rip-snorters like The Hour of the Furnaces, my first guess is that he'd probably want to punch director Adolfo Aristarain square in the jaw for broaching the subject of the Argentine economic collapse in such flabby, bourgeois terms. True, Aristarain shows exactly what the middle class had to face once the World Bank shellacked the local economy, but he depicts it in such an insular and anesthetized fashion that Common Ground doesn't register very loudly as a protest. In fact, the film's only major distinction is its ability to make enormous economic upheaval seem like a cramp in the style of its formerly comfortable leads, and to block out the rest of the country in its slow crawl to its central character's final destination.

Based on a novel by Lorenzo F. Aristarain, the film deals with Fernando Robles (Federico Luppi), a leftish college professor who's just been let go due to the looming crisis. Thus he has the singularly unenviable task of breaking the news to his social-worker wife Liliana (Mercedes Sanpietro)–or, in his case, not doing so until after they fly to Spain to visit their son, a ruse that Liliana manages to see through completely. The son, meanwhile, has given up a promising literary career to escape Argentina into a comfortable and boring life as a computer programmer, a fact which depresses the idealistic Fernando even further. In any event, Fernando and Liliana will have other things on his mind–like how to deal with losing their well-appointed apartment, and how to land on their feet on the estate of a lawyer friend. Can they deal with the change in life brought on by the crisis? Can they survive the challenge of their new circumstances?

Unfortunately, once you get to know the sweater-clad ciphers of the film's script, you're most likely to respond, "Who cares?" The fact is that Fernando simply isn't very interesting as a character: he's a collection of soft-left, middle-class attitudes that sound great on paper but fail to place him beyond his class and former privilege. We're told he's a leftist, but it never goes farther than vague lip service; we're told that his wife works with the homeless, but we never see her doing so or hear so much as a peep out of her charges. Their dialogues are mainly banalities about home and family and love, and, in the film's embarrassing prologue, Federico's ambitions to be a 'real' writer. Even the face-off between lefty father and sell-out son goes nowhere because nobody involved wants to draw blood. Further, the film is strangely confined to Fernando and Liliana's troubles: none of their friends (which in this movie is all of three people) face the axe, while they never notice anyone around them in similar circumstances. Suffice it to say that any Argentine without a friend's convenient piece of real estate to crash on are not going to get much out of this uncontroversial bit of fluff.

Worse, the stylistics go out of their way to make Fernando's trials seem as dire as stubbing one's toe. Set-up after set-up fails to move in and suggest what the characters are feeling, leaving us nothing to see but the characters swallowed up by the negative space of their surroundings. One would think that Aristarain the director would be dying to reveal the desperation of his protagonists as they are wrenched from everything they hold dear, but apparently not: he's so hands-off in rendering the narrative that it chills what is already a timid and quavering script into a film that barely registers on the consciousness. Not since Woody Allen went Bergman has this kind of bourgie tastefulness been so pervasive in a film–though in fairness, the Woodman would have at least included a few bad jokes (and a little jazz music) to leaven the repressed civility. As it stands, the only feeling one gets from Common Ground is the dull hum of things quietly happening–hardly the approach one should take to the shattering events it pretends to depict.

THE DVD
Wellspring's Common Ground disc does well for itself. The 1.78:1 anamorphic image is remarkably sharp, rendering the subtleties of the muted palette without muddiness. The 5.1 Dolby Digital mix (subtitled in English) is also remarkably nuanced for a film that doesn't really rely on its sound cues, and it finds myriad ways of deepening the aural environment without overpowering the action. The few extras: a theatrical trailer; filmographies for Aristarain and principals Federico Luppi and Mercedes Sanpietro; and a Wellspring weblink.

112 minutes; NR; 1.78:1 (16×9-enhanced); Spanish DD 5.1; CC; English (optional) subtitles; DVD-9; Region One; Wellspring