Suddenly (tan De Repente) (2002)

Collapse onto your couch and turn on your TV after a long day at work and you’re greeted with ads demanding that you get off your ass and do something spontaneous. Call in sick tomorrow and go to SeaWorld! Buy a Harley and join Tim Allen on the open road!

Marcia (Tatiana Saphir), the main character in the surprising and imaginative Suddenly, is just the sort of person these advertisements are aimed at. She’s a lonely, heavyset shop girl who eats dinner alone while watching cooking shows and whose idea of a whim is buying a pair of sunglasses during her lunch break. When Marcia’s claustrophobic routine is shattered, it won’t be at the behest of a marketing campaign, however, but at the point of a switchblade wielded by a woman named Mao (Carla Crespo).

As Mao and her partner, Lenin (Veronica Hassan), sweep Marcia off the streets of Buenos Aires and drive off into Argentina’s flatlands, Suddenly takes up the familiar call for spontaneity and makes it profound, imperative, and political. Like its punk-rock kidnappers, the film is, in its own twisted way, deeply and sincerely compassionate. Although Marcia is terrified when Mao first crudely propositions her, it becomes apparent that being swept away is the condition of her freedom. “You clearly have fantasies,” a blank-faced Lenin tells Marcia, who doesn’t disagree.

Suddenly owes much to early ’60s Godard. In his directorial debut, Diego Lerman shoots in grainy, high-contrast black and white; the effect is startling, if sometimes visually obscure, in the age of digital video. Like Godard, Lerman likes to move but will take time out for a shot of rain hitting a windshield or a dog running on a beach. Less like Godard, Lerman uses small movements of eyes and facial muscles, rather than dialogue, to convey meaning: a quick glance establishes dominance; a downturned mouth tightening into a horizontal smile suggests a flowering of self respect.

Thematically, Suddenly shares Godard’s impatience with bourgeois convention and antipathy towards the deadening effects of workaday life. Early in the film, Mao, Lenin, and Marcia sit down to smoke in a Burger King. A cheerful employee, whom we first see in profile next to her Employee of the Month plaque, comes over to ask them to put out their cigarettes. Mao and Lenin ignore her. “I hate these people,” says Lenin, when the worker leaves. It’s not the usual contempt with which people treat uniformed service workers – it’s harsher. The person who agrees to become a smiling automaton eight hours a day occupies a particularly debased spot in Mao and Lenin’s world.

Marcia defends the Employee of the Month. “What makes you think she’s different from me?” she asks Mao. “Have you ever had a job?” In fact, as we saw earlier, Mao and Lenin make their money by stealing and reselling mopeds, while Marcia sweeps, invoices, and stares into space at the lingerie shop where she works. At this point, Suddenly risks slipping into a glorification of “lifestyle” anti-capitalism couched in a Godardian cliché: the moped thief as ultimate anti-bourgeois heroine. Thankfully, the movie is too good and too complex for that.

While trying to make their way back to Buenos Aires from the coast, the trio ends up at the door of Lenin’s aged aunt Blanca. Blanca, played wonderfully by the late Beatriz Thibaudin, brings the movie down to earth at the same time she opens it up, just as Mao and Lenin opened up the movie earlier. Tolerant and generous, Blanca is an example of a life that is rooted but open to everyday meanderings. She keeps a chicken coop, and when she takes Lenin along to sell a few eggs to her neighbor, the neighborly visit turns into an afternoon of dog bites and drinking songs. We see Lenin smile for the first time.

Blanca’s is a life that feels, to use a tricky word, “authentic”; miles away from both the Employee of the Month and from Mao. It is in Blanca’s house, also populated by an artist (María Merlino) and a student (Marcos Ferrante) renting rooms there, that the relational dynamics between the three girls shift in surprising and affecting ways. It’s ironic that in this road movie, it’s a domestic space that offers the most possibilities for personal and interpersonal transformation.

The DVD extras are sparse: a director’s bio, a collection of stills, and some trailers. The bio does include a telling quote from Lerman, however. The director says that it’s important to “create a world… [where] anything can happen at anytime.” It’s an interesting suggestion that a fully lived life is not only an individual imperative, but also a social one.

But after watching Suddenly, one feels the need for a rear-guard defense, rather than a utopian building project. In Argentina, as in many places in the world, free time, time spent not working, is under attack. And it’s time, more than anything else, that made Blanca’s rich life possible. Trips to SeaWorld are all well and good, but a chicken coop and wide-open afternoons truly define freedom.