‘Something Old, Something New, Something Borrowed’: Cannes Review

Dir: Hernan Rosselli. Argentina/Portugal. 2024. 100mins.

The fallout of running a clandestine gambling business on a Buenos Aires family is explored to compelling and intense effect in Hernan Rosselli’s second feature, Something Old, Something New, Something Borrowed. Rosselli’s 2014 debut Mauro also explored lives at the criminal edge, but this time the canvas is wider, skillfully juggling a documentary-style insider view of murky goings-on, a tricky, noirish plotline and a tale of a young woman’s yearning for freedom from family. The air of claustrophobia and grunginess remain powerfully in evidence, though, in a film that sweats authenticity from every pore.

 Noir filtered through the lens of documentary

The air of reality is helped by the fact that the film’s two leads are played by a pair of non-actors, neighbours of the director. They play Maribel (Maribel Felpeto) and her mother Alejandra (Alejandra Canepa, Maribel’s real-life mother), suddenly left in charge of a gambling business run out of an estate in the outskirts of Buenos Aires on the death of Hugo, their father and husband respectively. A motley crew of tubby, mostly loveable rogues are there to help them out, including Leandro (Leandro Menendez), who is having an affair with Maribel. Business is good and the phone never stops ringing, but the news that a rival family has been raided by the police is casting a shadow over the future.

This present-day narrative is broken up by the story of the family’s past, as revealed in the seemingly endless home videos (supplied by the actors) made by the handsome, floppy-haired Hugo (Hugo Felpeto). These are inevitably records of happier times which also chart Alejandra’s life journey, from beautiful young ingenue to the hardnosed businessperson of the present. Hugo’s continuing influence is intensified by question marks hanging over his death. When Maribel logs into his Facebook page and finds a photo of someone who closely resembles her father, she starts to suspect she has a half-brother she knows nothing about. Accompanied by her friend Juliana (Juliana Inae Risso), Maribel adopts a fake identity to investigate, taking them into the potentially dangerous territory of rival gangs and causing fractures within the family.

If this all sounds noirish, then it is – but it’s filtered through the lens of documentary. (Inevitably some interesting details emerge about life in an illicit gambling ring, such as that the suicide rates of gamblers and bookies alike rises at Christmas, when the wins and losses are higher.) As with Mauro, which was about the hidden world of forgers, there’s the sense that Rosselli has spent time exploring this milieu. The experience for the viewer is an immersion in both the family and their affairs – an immersion which means that, at a couple of points, plot details become about as murky as the family’s business dealings.

In the present-day sequences the hand-held cameras, intimate close-ups and muttered dialogues – apparently inconsequential, but often loaded – often feel like fly-on-the-wall documentary. Much of what the viewer sees is recorded footage, whether it’s from Hugo’s home videos or from the security cameras that oversee life on the estate and inside the house itself. One tense scene involving Alejandra’s interrogation of a suspected rule-breaker makes smart use of the convention, which brings a jittery, paranoid air to the whole film. For obvious reasons this is an isolated and lonely family with lives that feel under continuous surveillance, and it’s from this oppressive atmosphere that Maribel, in the film’s second half, seems to be cannily planning her escape.  

The film uses Alejandra’s clumsy attempts to play Bach on a home keyboard as a kind of soundtrack to great effect. In a film where conversations are guarded and truths suppressed, it falls to the music to supply the emotion.