‘Sometimes Sadness, Sometimes Rebellion’ Venice Review: A Melancholic Meditation on Labor and Migration

For many, Bialet Massé is a tourist town located in the heart of the Punilla Valley, in Argentina’s Córdoba province. Others, however, will know that behind the name was a real person: Juan Bialet Massé, a Catalan teacher, researcher, builder and businessman who settled in Argentina in the late nineteenth century and spent much of his life in that central province. Among the many memorable—and sometimes rather curious—turns his life took, he left behind an important legacy in 1904, when he wrote a report, commissioned by President Julio Argentino Roca, on the working conditions of the country’s laboring classes. That text—titled The State of the Working Classes in the Interior of the Republic—provides the starting point for this sensitive, humanistic exploration of the world of work, past and present, by the director of About the Clouds.

Sometimes Sadness, Sometimes Rebellion —the beautiful title refers to a line from a song by Atahualpa Yupanqui called Milonga del peón de campo— builds its story around a meeting and a series of conversations. Its protagonists are Dante (played by film critic, programmer and occasional actor Roger Koza) and Eva (Eva Bianco, an icon of Córdoba cinema). He is an Argentine historian in Madrid —more precisely, in the beautiful library of the Reina Sofía Museum— working on his doctoral thesis about the figure of Bialet Massé and, more specifically, his exhaustive study of working conditions among laborers in Argentina at the beginning of the twentieth century. She is a filmmaker who is visiting the city after attending a film festival in France with a movie she directed.

Dante —who also lives in Córdoba— recognizes her in the library and approaches her in a way that is both awkward and uncomfortable. Before long, they are talking about their lives and experiences. The film chooses not to delve too deeply into their personal relationship —there are hints of flirtation, but these remain secondary— and soon turns its attention to Bialet Massé, his personal life, and his particular investigation, which took him across Argentina studying the working conditions of laborers. Thus, over coffee, walks through Madrid’s parks and streets, a failed attempt to go to the cinema, a car trip to the town where Bialet was born, a few misunderstandings and a curious dreamlike episode, Dante and Eva gradually get to know each other while trying to understand not only the life and work of the Catalan writer but also the ways in which they themselves do —or do not— work on these same issues.

The film’s central discussion eventually leads to a radical shift in its narrative. In her own way, Aparicio asks —and asks herself— how filmmakers, and perhaps historians as well, engage (or fail to engage) with the real problems facing people in today’s world. Eva questions Dante’s focus on the past rather than the present, but she also wonders whether traveling from festival to festival with films is itself part of a problematic circuit, one more concerned with personal ego than with any kind of political or social purpose. That debate leads the film itself to turn and become a moving documentary about the experiences of migrant workers in Spain.

The director of The Indefinite Things —which this film could be considered a kind of continuation of, and which was originally conceived that way— here directly confronts the living conditions of the working classes in both Argentina and Spain, paying particular attention to migrants. The film does not shy away from directly addressing current political events: the midterm elections won by Javier Milei with a little “help” from Donald Trump; Argentina’s labor reform, which extends the working day to twelve hours; and the growing disappearance of so-called “registered” or formal employment. This is true even as the way these conversations are presented occasionally leans toward a more poetic register.

Rigorous and clear in its mise-en-scène, with elegant piano sonatas on the soundtrack, Aparicio constructs a kind of politicized Before Sunrise, in which the encounters and misunderstandings between a man and a woman are shaped less by their private lives —which remain very much in the background— than by their conversations about the world of work. In the fluid calm of their dialogues, and in their painful reflections on the state of things, Dante and Eva weave together past and present, moving through a beautiful Madrid while also bringing to the foreground the contradictions of that city and of their respective stays in what is commonly called the “First World.”

Later, by turning through candid interviews to the experiences of other migrants living there under very different circumstances, Sometimes Sadness, Sometimes Rebellion brings its formal and thematic gambit to a moving conclusion. A hundred and twenty years after Bialet Massé’s investigation, today’s working reality appears not to have evolved all that much from the one he found in Argentina’s interior at the beginning of the twentieth century: employer exploitation, abusive working hours, meager wages, job insecurity, and so on—all of which affects migrant workers in particularly acute ways. And so, in a poetic, melancholic yet also forward-looking way, the film seems to return to the closing verse of Yupanqui’s classic milonga: “On more than one occasion / I’d like to turn into a partridge / To try to be happy / Somewhere far away / But truthfully, my friend, / I like the air here.”