Lázaro at Night doubles down on Fauna’s self-reflexive and increasingly elliptical cringe comedy while reconfiguring the small acting troupe Pereda’s worked with from the very beginning, a method which presumably adds resonant meta-layers to each subsequent characterization for viewers who’ve kept up. Given that aspect, as well as the fact that much of this film’s plot is about infidelity and a director casting his next film, and that this film itself is a conspicuously low-budget endeavor, it’s fair to say that while I don’t know if Pereda is deliberately courting Hong Sang-soo comparisons, he’s definitely earned them. Both are reasonably prestigious arthouse directors whose films regularly premiere at major world festivals and who work repeatedly with trusted performers on visibly strained budgets, so it’s unlikely that Pereda hasn’t thought about this at all. As a Hong true believer turned disappointed skeptic, I think Pereda’s now lapped him; from thematically comparable and equally technically simple building blocks, he’s created something of greater complexity and impact than Hong’s last five years of work. 

Lázaro begins with a simple kitchen scene in which a woman tells a man that she’s going to inform her boyfriend about their affair. The man’s seen first, drinking water in the center of a kitchen while resting against a back corner that gives the frame depth before the woman enters from foreground right. Their careful blocking, necessary for actors in a small space both in relation to each other and to the camera, is so skillful as to call attention to itself, undercutting the naturalism presumably being sought—a move confirmed as deliberate when the next scene reveals this to be from a to-be-made film we’re now watching a third performer audition for. The 72-minute Lázaro spends about 2/3 of its running time unpredictably and non-chronologically alternating between pre-production and, if not the film itself, presumably a vision of it; both those narratives center around infidelities, albeit not contemplated/committed by the same characters.

The pivot point in both plotlines is (of course!) the director himself (Gabriel Nuncio), who meets two of his would-be performers in a coffee shop. With both, he talks a big game about how he doesn’t want to force people into characters but instead imperceptibly make the two one, which is why he disdains auditions. “Just watching how you drink water tells me everything,” he tells Gabino (Gabino Rodríguez)—in this case, that the director doesn’t want to actually cast Gabino. With Luisa (Luisa Pardo), he drops the same spiel, then invites her to come “try on some costumes”—but his wife/co-writer (Clarissa Malheiros) is still at home. The following scene—in which she pretends to believe her husband’s excuse for why he brought a young woman back and forces Luisa to drink water, then wash dishes while pretending to observe (and find displeasing!) her affect—is a masterpiece of sustained group tension: the husband squirming in the background, Luisa’s body language spiraling towards greater depths of mortified self-effacement.

If the director is a sleaze, Pereda still takes his ideas seriously, as his own longtime troupe tends towards faultless naturalism. Storytelling through body language and almost nothing else reaches an unexpected apex when the finale redirects towards a pared-down retelling of Aladdin in which Gabino, now recast as the young thief, and his mother (Teresa Sánchez) eat large amounts of genie-provided food in a working example of narrative being conveyed through Akermanian minimalism. Pereda’s recent work includes a short styled as an open letter to the late filmmaker, Dear Chantal, and a scene in Gabino’s room—he argues with his mom as car headlights which are clearly artificial lighting move past his window frame—nods to a similar nighttime moment in Jeanne Dielman where that character’s living room walls are passingly illuminated by lights suggesting “passing cars” in an equally naturalistic/artificial-bordering-on-abstract way. As a whole, the film’s a meta-cinematic comedy which argues for the tradition it emerges from by practicing it while building to something just past the rationally decodable, a mixture I’m particularly susceptible to. 

This film was screened at the 62nd New York Film Festival.