Strange Brews

The moody music and remote setting signal horrors on the horizon, though they turn out to be less spectacular in form than one might expect. In the car, a close-up observes Jeff’s hand nervously inching toward Aliocha’s before she casually moves hers away, unaware of the boy’s tormented machinations. This pouty youngblood, the group’s outsider, emerges as our unlikely protagonist, and it’s his sheepish and sexually insecure disposition that colors the film and fuels its undercurrent of paranoia. Nothing, it turns out, is more terrifying than fragile masculinity. For most of the film, Albert and Blake are at each other’s throats. Both of their careers have gone downhill since they stopped working together, and Blake—a brooding macho opposite Albert’s Peter Griffin type—is overly eager to enact petty paybacks. In one scene, Blake secretly replaces Albert’s vintage wine with an inferior bottle, and all hell breaks loose when Jeff blows the whistle. Hypnotizing group dinner scenes captured in static long takes see the two men verbally duking it out as the other guests shift uneasily in their seats.

But for all of the intrigue generated by the adult duo’s conflict, Lesage is more interested in the way these tensions affect our hormonal hero Jeff, an aspiring filmmaker. While, for instance, Xavier Dolan’s portraits of young Canadian men rely on the conventions of melodrama to communicate the big emotions of adolescence (you never feel as deeply as when you’re a teenager), Lesage conveys Jeff’s sentimental education by promiscuously pivoting from genre to genre. After Jeff fails to woo Aliocha, Who by Fire transforms into a nocturnal thriller. He storms off into the forest and gets lost, and spends one harrowing night alone, enacting a psychological spiral whose stakes are, in the end, somewhat insignificant. (The cabin turns out to be right around the corner.) Later, during a particularly festive evening, a musical sensibility takes over the film when a B-52s record inspires an extended dance scene involving the entire cast. That same night, Jeff is the voyeur in an erotic mystery when he catches Blake taking racy pictures of Aliocha, and these simmering-to-boiling resentments turn nearly fatal during a disastrous hunting-and-canoeing expedition that takes cues from the bleak, survivalist thrills of Deliverance (1972). Jeff, oddly enough, barely speaks relative to the garrulous other characters, yet his emotional ups and downs seem to determine the film’s shifting styles—it’s as if he were already behind the camera, using cinema to articulate what he could never say aloud.

If Who by Fire stages dinner scenes in a major key, Nicolás Pereda’s Lázaro at Night plays them in a minor one while similarly probing the parameters of artistic creation. This isn’t an entirely new line of inquiry for the Mexican-Canadian filmmaker (his 2020 film Fauna is a droll deconstruction of pop-culture clichés related to narco-trafficking), though Lázaro stands out for its fresh—somehow even more slippery—layers of self-reflexivity. Again working on a shoestring budget with his troupe of regular performers, Pereda starts out in contemporary Mexico City, where several wires are crossed and identities merged. Luisa (Luisa Pardo) is married to Gabino (Gabino Rodríguez, billed here as “Lázaro G. Rodríguez”), but she’s sleeping with Francisco (Francisco Barreiro). The trio of friends are purportedly actors and/or artists, though not one of them seems to have much of a résumé—and their sleepy, stilted affects suggest that they’ve got time on their hands. Each of them shows up separately to a casting call at a coffee shop, where the director (Gabriel Nuncio) simply observes them, as opposed to having them read lines or perform scenes. The audition starts as soon as they walk through the door.

Where does a character (or a performance) begin and end? What agency, if any, do we have over our identities? Existential questions are treated with the dry humor and awkward pauses customary of Pereda’s recent work, and his actors expand seemingly simple setups through expressive body language. Gabino insists on being called “Lázaro”—his new stage name—but his friends have trouble remembering it, and his mom refuses to use it so long as he lives under her roof. When Luisa is invited to the director’s swanky home to “try on some costumes,” she ends up washing the dishes as part of her audition. The moment would seem innocent enough were it not for the dynamics of power communicated by the director’s raised shoulders and squirming posture—and his wife’s crossed arms, which signal righteous disapproval. Luisa looks back at them repeatedly, wondering when she’ll be asked to stop. It’s a wonderfully cringe vignette for all the unfortunate possibilities it teases out: the couple’s marital (and artistic?) tensions, the suspicion that the director is used to bringing young actresses home, and the sense that the only role this lofty filmmaker sees the humble Luisa in is that of a housemaid.

One night, Gabino, Luisa, and Francisco gather in Gabino’s apartment to listen to the recording of a lecture by their former acting teacher, and her voice carries over as the the three characters walk out into the street, departing and converging in different configurations. “Sometimes you dream about a person, and when you wake up, you realize their image doesn’t correspond to the person you dreamed of,” says the teacher. “[It] doesn’t correspond, but you know it’s that person.” This dizzying declaration speaks to the uncanny links and phantasmal projections that make up Pereda’s loose-limbed experiments, with Lázaro explicitly engaging with his filmmaking process and its straddling of rehearsal and reality. As in Fauna, a nested story takes up Lázaro’s final act: Aladdin (a reimagined Gabino), who lives on top of a mountain with his mother (Teresita Sánchez), summons a genie and wishes for food. We watch as mother and son consume their feast. Aladdin sells the silver plates that came with the food for money, but that runs out, too. He summons the genie again, and asks for the same thing—and again we sit with the two as they silently enjoy their meal. Despite the fantastical trappings of the setup, they dine together with the same naturalism as—and certainly more vigor than—we witness in an earlier scene in which Luisa, Gabino, and Francisco meet up at an eerily empty taco joint. These dining scenes bring to mind the fictional director’s interest in verisimilitude, which Pereda shares while skirting its association with realism. For him, there are echoes of other worlds and identities contained in the most basic gestures—sipping, eating, washing dishes—which Pereda’s cinema of déjà vu and waking dreams allows us to apprehend.

Beatrice Loayza is a writer and historian who contributes regularly to The New York Times, The Criterion Collection, The Nation, 4Columns, and other publications.