Flashback Review on Soriano by Montes-Bradley

When Eduardo Montes-Bradley's documentary Soriano premiered at the Buenos Aires festival in April 1999, Argentina's newspaper of record gave it a full-page spread in its prestigious Cultura y Nación section. The headline critic Jorge Carnevale chose — El narrador interminable, "The Endless Narrator" — said everything. Osvaldo Soriano had been dead for just over two years, but the film made unmistakably clear: he wasn't going anywhere.

Carnevale's subtitle set the tone: "Un sorprendente retrato del escritor trazan sus amigos y colegas en un revelador filme" — a surprising portrait of the writer drawn by his friends and colleagues in a revealing film. And surprising it was. Montes-Bradley assembled a remarkable cast of witnesses: novelists Martín Caparrós, Juan Forn, and Rodolfo Rabanal; cultural journalist Pasquini Duran; legendary filmmaker Fernando Birri; and director Héctor Olivera, who had adapted Soriano's fiction for the screen.

What emerged from their testimonies was a portrait of a writer who occupied a singular — and somewhat paradoxical — place in Argentine letters. Caparrós put it memorably:

"Un bien producido pop." A well-produced pop commodity. But far from diminishing the work, Caparrós argued this was precisely what made Soriano matter: he arrived at the Academy first through the market, and only afterward as Literature.— MARTÍN CAPARRÓS, AS QUOTED IN CARNEVALE'S REVIEW

He entered, as another voice in the film observed, through the back door — and then refused to leave. The film traces the arc from the early Soriano — the one who startled the literary world with his second novel — to the fully formed voice that readers on multiple continents came to love.

Carnevale evokes "el Soriano fabuloso," the fabulous Soriano: the prose style, the insolence of his characters, the unmistakable cadence of his speech. A man as recognizable in the cafés of Paris as in the bars of Buenos Aires.

Soriano died on January 29, 1997, at only 54 years old. In the film, his friends do not grieve so much as they testify — and Montes-Bradley holds the camera steady while they do. The result, in Carnevale's reading, is not an obituary but a reckoning: with a writer celebrated in his lifetime by popular readers and eventually, if sometimes grudgingly, by academic critics; with an Argentina that drove him into exile and then celebrated his return; with a voice that, two years after his death, showed no signs of falling silent.

Clarín called Soriano a revelador filme — a revealing film. Twenty-seven years on, that verdict holds.

ORIGINAL SOURCE

Carnevale, Jorge. "El narrador interminable." Clarín, sec. Cultura y Nación, 11 Apr. 1999, p. 11.