A Review Of Adolfo Aristarain's Argument

The Academy Award nominated director Adolfo Aristarain manages to create a movie that would combine both a classical tragedy with its preoccupation with the questions of freedom and predetermination and a postemodernist piece of art with its denial of the universal truth and morality. The movie narrates a story of the relationships between a famous film director Martin (starred by Federico Luppi) and his son (young Juan Diego Botto), who has the same name. Family ties become central to the movie plot, as unwanted by his mother and her new family, young Martin moves to live with his father in Madrid, where the father’s homosexual eccentric friend Dante and young lover Alicia become his new family. The conflict between generations often escalating …show more content…
Here the idea of predetermination associated with the repetion of the father’s fate clashes with Martin’s personal understanding of freedom. Having the same name as his father, Martin, the son, finds himself in the center of the eternal conflict between pre-determination, in his case incarnated in the figure of his father and the free will, which manifests itself in a search of a personal path, which may lie outside of his father’s undestanding. In addition to the conflict between liberty and predetermonation of the main character, the movie’s resemblance with an ancient tragedy lies in the tragic consequences of the unresolved tension between …show more content…
Again this can be seen in the characters’ disagreement with the conservative view of Martin. the father, and their doubts about the existence of a universal truth. The point of the movie is that anyone can live as he wants, abandoning the limitations imposed by the society. Be you drug addicted or homosexual, you have a right to defend your own truth, whatever it is. The film renounces the search of truth and morality in favour of freedom and tolerance. This “breaking the mold” spirit can be well seen in the sequence when Martin’s gay friend Dante, interrupts his theater performance and leaves the stage, accusing the spectators of hipocrisy. Therefore, the movie´s ambiguous morality is its moral message, which reflects the post-modern moral