‘Pin de fartie’ Venice Review: A Playful, Poignant Meditation on Finitude
Mixing humor, melancholy, and political resonance, Alejo Moguillansky’s film becomes both a reflection on endings—of relationships, of art, of a country—and a luminous celebration of cinema, theater, and music.
Samuel Beckett’s universe has always felt close to the work of Alejo Moguillansky, with its personal blend of humor, absurdity, and tragedy. PIN DE FARTIE is an attempt to move a step closer to the Irish author’s singular body of work. Without being a direct adaptation of FIN DE PARTIE (aka ENDGAME), the filmmaker behind CASTRO borrows some of the dramatic ideas, aesthetic concepts, and themes from the 1957 play to offer a serene and melancholic reflection—though not without humor and anguish—on what could be seen as an end of times.
Less overtly apocalyptic than Beckett’s work—which places its four characters in a tiny room of an abandoned house in a seemingly bleak future—Moguillansky’s film reorganizes and expands the cast of characters and the spaces they move through to propose a disenchanted view of the present. The political references to Argentina’s current situation begin subtly but eventually become very direct, accompanied by delicate observations on human relationships, love, solitude, and, above all, the arts. Indirectly, PIN DE FARTIE is a celebration of cinema, theater, and music—a tribute to cultural labor in a country whose government scorns it.
The Hamm and Clov of the original play are here transformed into Otto (Santiago Gobernori) and Cleo (Cleo Moguillansky, the director’s daughter and a revelatory performer), a blind “monarch” and his servant/guide who helps him, though their relationship is tense and at times openly combative. Instead of a gloomy chamber, they inhabit a house by a Swiss lake, where they stage sharp, often ferocious verbal sparring matches. The film quickly opens another layer, introducing a second duo (it is, in essence, a film of couples) in a recording studio. There, Luciana Acuña serves as narrator, organizing the story’s shifting planes, while Maxi Prietto turns some of her phrases, ideas, and remarks into songs.
Soon after, a third couple takes the place of the original. Laura Paredes and Marcos Ferrante play a man and a woman who meet once a week in an apartment facing Buenos Aires’ Plaza Congreso to read and rehearse Beckett’s play, all the while negotiating a tentative romance in the background. The director himself also appears, in a segment shared with pianist Margarita Fernández (his collaborator in LA VENDEDORA DE FOSFOROS), playing a pianist seemingly at death’s door and her son preparing for her farewell. A fifth duo—Laura López Moyano and Fernando Tur—briefly appear as Otto’s parents, occupying the same roles as Hamm’s parents in Beckett’s text, living inside a trash bin. And lurking in the shadows, orchestrating many scenes, are two filmmakers building miniature sets of toy trains and cardboard moons.
As these couples move in and out of the film, an unsettling sense of finality hovers over it all: the end of times as the closing stage of a chess game (to which Beckett’s title refers), the end of relationships, and, in the film’s boldest and most pointed gesture, the end of a country overtaken by a gang of deranged loudmouths. Beyond its moments of humor—found mostly in the prickly chemistry between Otto and Cleo—PIN DE FARTIE is a sad film, filled with both beautiful, melancholic passages and others that are bitter and despairing, all of them suffused with a sense of finitude that runs from beginning to end.
It is also a visually gorgeous film, shot partly in the Swiss countryside and by the edge of a lake, where Otto and Cleo perform a charming choreographed sequence to one of Prietto’s songs—arguably the most luminous moment in the entire film. The scenes with Paredes and Ferrante are, within this context, the most classically dramatic, offering discreet yet moving exchanges that diverge slightly from the more “absurdist” and labyrinthine dialogues elsewhere in the narrative.
Like any work based on or inspired by Beckett, it is open to interpretation: complex, and often infused with bitter desolation. Moguillansky preserves that tone but manages to find room for subtle, sensitive connections between his protagonists. If we are approaching the end of a civilization we are constantly bidding farewell to, the best thing is to have someone close by—even if it’s just to share anecdotes and laugh together inside a garbage can. Or, better still, to play and listen to the same piece by Beethoven, over and over again.
