email print share on Facebook share on Twitter share on LinkedIn share on reddit pin on Pinterest

BERLINALE 2022 Encounters

Review: A Little Love Package

by 

- BERLINALE 2022: Gastón Solnicki's fifth feature is a baffling experiment made all the more confusing by being billed as a “classic comedy”

Review: A Little Love Package
Angeliki Papoulia (left) and Carmen Chaplin in A Little Love Package

Argentinian filmmaker Gastón Solnicki's fifth feature, A Little Love Package [+see also:
trailer
interview: Gastón Solnicki, Angeliki P…
film profile
]
, is one of the ways for the Berlinale to demonstrate the direction in which its young competitive Encounters section wants to head in. This is why it's baffling that it is billed as a “classic comedy”, when it is rarely funny and very little in it, except for Rui Poças' cinematography and some of the music, is classical.

(The article continues below - Commercial information)

Angeliki (Angeliki Papoulia) wants to buy a flat in Vienna, with help from her interior designer Carmen (Carmen Chaplin). This happens in 2019, when smoking is finally banned in the bars of the Austrian capital, which had been heroically resisting it for decades. Solnicki depicts this end of an era by showing a real-life, empty cafe, belonging to the Weidinger family for four generations, and in it, the current owner, Nikolaus, eating an egg.

Carmen takes Angeliki through the historic city, showing her all kinds of places, but she has complaints about each of them. And this is about the extent of the film's narrative in the traditional sense, which then veers off down associative branches. The narrator (Mexican writer Mario Bellatin, who at one point starts singing his text, in such a caricature that we can't follow what it is that he is saying) mentions a meteorite from Mars that landed in Morocco. This is a cue to show us Nikolaus with Carmen in the nature museum, where he, among colourful fragments of minerals, tells her that the first nuclear reaction ever took place in nature, in Gabon, two billion years ago. This is followed by images of what we assume are the savannahs of Gabon, and then by scenes shot in what looks like a salt flat, where a man and a drone follow a mysterious shadow.

After Angeliki finally chooses a flat, the narrator informs us that Carmen had to go home with “Uma” to visit her ailing father. Yes, there was a child, we recall, but there were other children, too, who seemed to enter and leave the scenes without any specific context... And indeed, Chaplin's real family is there, in what we conclude is Málaga, but why Solnicki decided to show us their bickering about responsibility and generosity – except to connect it to Carmen not understanding earlier why Angeliki finds it so hard to spend her money – is anyone's guess.

The finale brings us back to Angeliki in Vienna, finally in a marvellous scene, a collision of nostalgia and the recognition of reality, beautifully edited by Alan Martín Segal to Black's “Wonderful Life”. But too little, too late for an 80-minute film. If it didn't star two well-known actresses, it may as well have been an experimental documentary. There are many non-professionals in the picture, but it makes little difference, as we have no idea who it is that the actresses are playing. Themselves... we guess?

The main redeeming quality of the feature is the camerawork by one of the great cinematographers of our time, Poças. He goes for the most classical approach, with static camera or dolly, which is certainly the right way to film Vienna. Every shot is beautifully composed, and the light is always perfect: it is a joy to witness a master at work. But the feeling of randomness that pervades the film makes it hard to always enjoy it.

A Little Love Package is a co-production between Austria's Little Magnet Films and Argentina's Filmy Wiktora.

(The article continues below - Commercial information)

Did you enjoy reading this article? Please subscribe to our newsletter to receive more stories like this directly in your inbox.

Privacy Policy