Francisco Lezama | Un movimiento extraño (An Odd Turn) / 2024

the swing of the pendulum

by Douglas Messerli

 

Francisco Lezama (screenwriter and director) Un movimiento extraño (An Odd Turn) / 2024 [22 minutes]

 

Argentinian director Francisco Lezama’s takes several odd turns, not just one. Part of the reason for this has to do with his authorial process. Opposed to what he describes as “the classic-Aristotelian-three-act-hero-journey [that] has been imposed in narrative fiction,” for many months before he writes and shoots a film Lezama collects “dialogues, editing ideas, academic quote, silly jokes, etc.” on a series of small cards from which he selects the best (about 20) of them, and then determines the characters, plot, dialogue, structure and much else without discarding any of the remaining cards.

     As he argues, the writers of the traditional method of narrative and filmmaking “are forced to separate characters from their background, to create challenges for them, to move them like puppets.” But his method seems, so he feels, closer to life, his film reminding him “of tapestries and imagery from the Middle Ages. In these paintings, rather than a clear single path, you can find a kind of wooded landscape… a forest with many trees and many paths. I find in these references much more inspiration, more openness, more vital electricity than in classicism. In this wilder and woodlike form every digressive idea seems to fit easily. Everything seems possible to unfold and enter the film — without prejudices regarding whether they would work or not. I believe this is closer than life. It’s something personal.”

    This almost Oulipian method allows him, in the instance of An Odd Turn, to combine dissimilar and even contradictory concerns. The major figure of the work, Lucrecia (Laila Maltz), works as a guard in a museum, who loves her job because it allows her long nights with the art itself in which she illuminates with her flashlight, seeking out their significance, so to speak, in the dark. And in that sense she a figure of rationality, like Plato’s vision of man, seeking to read meaning in the shadows.

   So too, however, she is also a figure of superstition, who often organizes her life around pendulum readings, using anything from a tea-bag on a string to a brass plumb to foretell the future.

    It doesn’t always work. For example, she tells her friend that she has foreseen the museum itself being robbed by the end of the month, an event that never happens.

     On the other hand, her mystical reading that the dollar will soon rise in value against the Argentinian peso does happen, particularly after Argentinian President Javier Milei suggests that the country should adopt the US currency which created a run on US money.

    Lucrecia is also a highly sexual being, and before the dollar’s rise has been regularly meeting up in the middle of the night with another museum worker. When their communications are intercepted by a museum head, and she is given a choice of a strong pay cut or being fired, she insists that her severance pay be in made in US dollars.

    And since in the meantime the dollar has risen, the currency exchanges send their workers into the street to call out, a bit like carnival barkers, that they can change the peso into dollars—for a good profit of course.

     One such exchange office worker (Paco Gorriz) attracts the attention of Lucrecia, who makes a date with him, and upon discovering that he occasionally uses the opportunity of his now open-air bartering to meet up with older woman, who pay him for both his services in bed and for any currency exchanges they may desire.

     The clever former museum guard, now working the night shift in a coffee-cup manufacturing plant, suggests the clear money-changer should use the methods of Grindr, letting people know where he will be at all times geographically so that he can meet up for rendezvouses.

     Meanwhile she and the money exchanger also have sex which they both enjoy, and soon they regularly meet up for intercourse. He explains, soon after, that he has made an appointment with a bisexual man who is willing to include Lucrecia as well in a sexual trio. And eventually the film catches their encounter with the Grindr guy (Alejandro Russek) first in a gay bar named Lolita where he and the other male dance together, and finally in an apartment, where it appears that the two men are more interested in one another, and that Lucrecia must continually remind them that she too is part of their trio.

     In fact, she is not at all sure of her romance with the money changer and consults the tarot cards on the matter, but he refuses to participate in the reading.

     Accordingly, there is no resolution in this wonderful tale, yet we learn a great deal about these individuals struggling to survive in a society that has just steered itself clear of the horrific period of the so-called “Dirty War” in which hundreds were killed mysteriously by death squads against socialism, left-wing Peronism or the Montoneros movement, along with Jews and anyone else who might have been seen to question their tactics. The present, in its advance of “frictionless capitalism,” as Lezama puts it, seems almost as problematic to young people like the characters in this work.

     Perhaps the ridiculous mix of magic and clever entrepreneurship, as well as the almost unflinching willingness to try out any new combination of behaviors, including other sexualities, is the only answer in a world where the rigidity of a single viewpoint often meant certain death.

     Lezama’s film does not specifically locate any of his characters within this complex of ideas. They act eccentrically of their own accord. Yet his open-ended work allows us to at least query a wide range of cultural aspects of contemporary Argentine life. That he does all of this in a little less than a half hour is amazing. Little wonder it was awarded the Golden Bear Award for short cinema at the 2024 Berlin film festival.

 

Los Angeles, September 2, 2025

Reprinted in My Queer Cinema blog (September 2025).