Punto Rojo

Just as new generations rediscover the music Pink Floyd and the Grateful Dead, filmmakers are also partial to dusting off inspirations that have been on the shelf for a while.  The fallout from Tarantino’s first two films –Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction – lasted well into the early aughts until passing the baton to directors like Guy Ritchie who added their own up-tempo style.  With Punto Roj0 (2021), Argentinian director Nic Loreti brings things full circle with a non-linear noir-influenced plot that hits like Uma Thurman snorting a faceful of cocaine.  “I said goddamn!”

 

The movie begins with Diego (Demián Salomón), a thug with an encyclopedic knowledge of soccer history, killing time in his car by answering questions on a radio call-in quiz show. Now and then he stops to check on the passenger bound and gagged in his trunk: Nesquick, a low-level middleman who (as we discover in flashback) has screwed up not one but two jobs he intended to pull on the same day.  It’s at that point a terrorist falls out of the sky and an Interpol agent shoots Diego in the face.  Things only get more complicated – and crazy – from there.

 

Much of the pleasure in Loreti’s script comes from the conflicting scams and implausibly conjoined characters brought together by a MacGuffin every bit as mysterious as Pulp Fiction’s glowing briefcase.  The fun is watching the picture slowly develop as it connects the dots, so it’s best to go in blind. Along with a trio of great actors (Salomón was just in the disturbing When Evil Lurks), Punto Rojo ingeniously works backstory into the plot on the fly, giving their performances a narrative drive that never takes its foot off the gas.

 

Loreti’s film may owe a creative debt to Tarantino’s gangster aesthetic, but it’s not shackled by it.  Punto Rojo shares that same sense of cinematic playfulness with a dash of comic book style but inevitably blazes its own trail.  It takes real skill to juggle as many balls as Loreti does without dropping them.  That’s not just copycat filmmaking, that’s fucking entertainment.

 

Punto Rojo premieres on Blu-ray with English subtitles, the original theatrical trailer and one of Loreti’s previous short films, Pinball.  Well worth a blind buy!   

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