‘Homo Argentum’ Review: The Exhaustion of Easy Cynicism

Anyone who has visited this site before and read some of my reviews of films by Mariano Cohn and Gastón Duprat will already know that they are not among my favorite filmmakers. In fact, I stand almost at the opposite end of the spectrum from nearly everything they think, do, or claim to believe about cinema. That said, until a few years ago there was at least one undeniable aspect of their work: their films connected with audiences. They made people laugh, offered reasonably clever twists, and occasionally took conceptual risks. I wasn’t interested in them, admittedly, but I could understand why others were. Films like The Man Next Door, The Distinguished Citizen, and—though to a lesser extent—Official Competition showed clear signs of creative effort, even if one rejected their ideas, worldview, sense of humor, or underlying philosophy.

Something similar has happened with the television series they’ve made. Both The Boss (El encargado) and Fine Arts (Bellas artes) displayed a certain inventiveness in their early seasons, only to veer off course later on, turning into rushed products that felt underwritten and creatively indifferent. What remained was the bare minimum required to keep the machine running: hollow provocations and empty gestures sustained only by the momentum of what had been built before. On top of that, the series recycled the same vision of the world and the same kinds of characters, which by now feel exhausting and predictable, if not outright unbearable: con artists, cheats, opportunists, manipulators, “lovable rogues,” dishonest strivers, or simply unpleasant people. Repetition eventually curdled into tedium.

Homo Argentum confirms—and perhaps consecrates—that philosophy of “minimum effort.” This applies to its ideas, its wit, its scripts, its originality, its situations, its dialogue, its resolutions, and even to the sheer volume of product placement that visibly props it up financially. The film is made up of around fifteen short vignettes spread across a little more than ninety minutes. These micro-stories attempt a low-rent version of a familiar question once posed by Argentine comedian Fabio Alberti: “What’s wrong with us? Are we crazy?” Designed in a format that seems tailor-made for social media—several could easily function as TikTok or Instagram reels, and were likely conceived with that in mind—the film advances a blunt thesis: the “homo argentum,” regardless of class or background, is fundamentally objectionable. Corrupt, dishonest, opportunistic, selfish, jealous, deceitful, irresponsible, hypocritical—the list goes on.

The shorts are there to prove the point. There’s a man who accidentally causes a serious car crash and pretends nothing happened; a businessman trapped in an elevator with a young woman who turns out to be dangerous; a filmmaker who treats the people he portrays with open contempt; a street currency trader who scams tourists. Other segments, less overtly nasty, feel almost devoid of creative effort: a priest working at a soup kitchen, a sports commentator during a decisive match, a family trip to the airport to say goodbye to a daughter, a father trying to push his nearly forty-year-old son to move out. Most of these sketches offer only what is strictly necessary to function, as if the writers were working on intellectual autopilot or deliberately dumbing things down for an audience they assume to be less perceptive than they are. The result is a string of weak jokes that wouldn’t have survived even on the broad, outdated TV comedy shows of the 1980s.

Three or four episodes are somewhat more elaborate and ambiguous, and in my view reveal a glimmer of genuine craft: a security guard who ends up caring for a young woman over the course of a strange night; a wealthy businessman who tries to help a boy asking him for money; a neighbor who loudly promises to “open fire” if anyone breaks into his house; and, to a point, a segment that takes its protagonist to Italy to meet distant relatives—a story that can easily be read as a tongue-in-cheek explanation of the (Sicilian) origins of the behavioral traits the filmmakers attribute to Argentinians. Still, most of the vignettes come and go without much impact. It’s also obvious that some—particularly the elevator episode, the celebrated filmmaker, and the tourist scammer—are staged primarily as provocations, designed to irritate those the directors label as sanctimonious or politically correct.

I haven’t mentioned Guillermo Francella yet, who plays every role in the film. His presence accounts for the film’s strongest element and the area where the most care was clearly invested: the excellent work in characterization, hair, makeup, and costume design, which ensures that each character looks visually distinct. Beyond those surface differences, however, Francella largely does the same thing every time. His two or three familiar performance modes—the slick hustler, the supposedly humble man who isn’t quite as decent as he appears—are repeated over and over, along with his well-known tics: the verbal timing, the eye-rolling, the slightly exaggerated mugging reminiscent of classic Italian comic acting. It’s the Francella audiences already know well, half inside the film and half winking at the viewer from the sidelines.

In a year when Argentine television comedy has taken a significant leap forward with series like Black Widows, Menem, and Division Palermo—shows that deploy irony, subtlety, ambiguity, and a thematically intelligent form of provocation—the hollowness of Cohn and Duprat’s work becomes even more apparent. Not only on an ideological or ethical level, but in the basic, moment-to-moment mechanics of storytelling: how scenes are built, how characters function, how dialogue lands, how jokes are shaped. The series mentioned above aim for an intelligent audience and raise the bar accordingly, trusting viewers to meet them there. They tackle potentially uncomfortable material—the jet-black humor of the first, the relatively sympathetic portrayal of a deeply questionable public figure in the second, jokes involving disability in the third—but they do so by pushing beyond the obvious.

In Homo Argentum, none of that effort is present. What remains is little more than an after-dinner collection of anecdotes you’ve heard a thousand times already, retold by some slightly reactionary, half-drunk uncle who can’t quite remember them properly.