Whisky (Pablo Stoll, Juan Pablo Rebella, Uruguay)

By Jay Kuehner

Graduating from the beer, smoke, and boredom-induced haze of their slacker-set debut 25 Watts (2001), Uruguayan duo Pablo Stoll and Juan Pablo Rebella take an appreciable leap forward with Whisky. The story of a lonely, sexagenarian keeper of a near-obsolete Montevideo sock factory, Whisky couldn’t be more nominally different from its predecessor yet, essentially bypassing middle age, arrives at a similarly torpid impasse. From the chronic underemployment of youth to the numbing narcotic of a routine job, work is what fills the void.

Though the film’s title suggests an effect of time endured over a clinking highball glass, it’s derived instead from that dreaded command—a South American variation on “Say cheese”—used to contrive a forced smile. Whisky’s lanky unmarried sock man Jacobo (unerringly played by Andres Pazos) seems physically unable to yield so much as a grin; his gaunt, furrowed face wears a history of acrimony. In a woefully monotonous manner commensurate with its subject, the film charts Jacobo’s quotidian grind, which begins with morning coffee in an appropriately ill-lit cafe and his unfailing arrival at the factory’s iron roll-up. A rote greeting is exchanged with Marta (Mirella Pascual)—senior among Jacobo’s three female employees, and sympathetic confidante by proxy—clinches the ritual (Jacobo’s flip of a switch, while Marta dons a uniform, amounts to a leitmotif).

Firmly ensconced in his threadbare shop, amid the din of antiquated machinery, Jacobo ekes out a life as a man half-expecting his own extinction, stepping out to send faxes or trying to repair broken blinds in the meantime. There’s scarce insight into Jacobo’s embittered state; the impending anniversary of his mother’s death justifies some of the enigma, yet his is a carapace seemingly formed at birth (Jacob, anyone?). Indeed, the arrival of Jacobo’s brother Herman (Jorge Bolani), an outgoing family man with a successful sock factory in Brazil—where even the soap operas are better—rekindles a passive yet seething sibling conflict. Prepared to defend himself, guilty loner Jacobo asks his employee Marta to pose as his wife for the duration of Herman’s visit, a request which she obliges dutifully, yet with furtive hope. The estranged siblings’ joyless reunion entails a laughable gift exchange of—what else—socks (Herman, revealingly, forgets to remove the price tag).

Whisky’s anodyne surface belies its schema, just as its foregrounding of the mundane disguises a sense of quiet devastation. Witness the virtual gallery of domestic banality on display: pink pillows, green glass ashtrays, refrigerator magnets, cellophane-wrapped chicken…and mother’s oxygen tank, dragged out of sight for the new nuptial arrangement. Separate beds are pushed together, a single bed sheet serving to hide the fissure. Glossing the deal, Jacobo even arranges for a portrait of himself and the wife. But not even whisky, it would appear, can save a sorry face.

Stasis continues unabated in spite of Herman’s visit, more an inconvenience than a perturbation. The two brothers effectively nullify each other, evidenced in a moment of quality time at the local soccer match: while Herman seizes the opportunity to advance his better business theory, Jacobo, in a rare display of passion, advises the referee on just where he can shove that flag. No sooner is Jacobo ready for his brother’s repatriation that Herman, in a possible act of contrition for having missed his mother’s funeral, invites the couple to a seaside resort where the brothers vacationed as children.

It’s here, in an empty hotel—save for a couple of Argentine honeymooners—that the trio’s tenuous relationship is slowly denuded. While the absence of work finds Jacobo marooned like a crab at low tide, a modest appreciation develops between Herman and Marta (one perfectly pitched sequence involves the loss of Marta’s ill-fitted wedding ring in the hotel pool while Herman attempts a recovery). With her humility and unfettered enjoyment of simple things, Marta emerges from near anonymity to redress the audience’s sympathies as well as possibly redeem Jacobo’s misanthropy. Whisky delicately extracts overwhelming proof of repressed emotion from the barest minutiae. The sibling’s reckoning takes place on an air hockey table. And the glass of water Jacobo fetches for Marta, gently placed on the nightstand while she sleeps, is among the film’s more aching images.

With its detached irony, Whisky has invited comparisons to Aki Kaurismäki—fair enough, but an ultimately confining assessment (Martin Rejtman’s The Magic Gloves, for one, submits a variation on a similar South American anomie, while Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Distant treads, albeit more severely, a related emotional terrain). Still, its filmmakers’ more modest claim that Whisky is little more than a children’s story about grown-ups offers the most fitting context. Whisky’s obvious absurdity is saved by a mournful undercurrent, and the film’s ending bears this out. Upon returning home—a montage reveals Jacobo’s apartment in all its mausoleum-like glory—an obvious question arises: was it just a ruse? As practically as the beds are divided, and mother’s wheelchair is rolled back to its rightful place, Jacobo resumes his habitual position as a ghost among the machines.

Jay Kuehner

Whisky

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