El dependiente

Fernández works at a business that sells hardware store items. The death of his boss, don Vila, is a recurring thought—he never forgets that once he promised, in passing, that someday the business would be his. Fernández’s days go by between the business’ routine and the visits to the house of the woman he loves, Miss Plasini, who lives with her mother and brother in a suffocating, sinister environment. In his third feature, Leonardo Favio builds a portrait of apathy and averageness, through a formal oddness he had already explored in his previous film, El romance del Aniceto y la Francisca. The Dependent is the curious case of a film at once distant and intense, with a dense general tone and shocking shifts in its approach. It also represents the end of the first stage in its director’s filmography, which would mutate radically in his following work, Juan Moreira.