In the year 2001, the Argentinean filmmaker Lisandro Alonso kinda created a blueprint for a new form of hybrid cinema with his film La Libertad which combined the aesthetics and ad hoc naturalism of documentary with the dramatic manipulations and carefully staged cinematography that comes from fiction filmmaking. He also created an iconic sequence within the annals of 21st century world cinema, as his film ended with its protagonist, a solitary lumberjack named Misael (Misael Saavedra), killing, preparing, cooking and then eating an armadillo.
Fast-forward 25 years, and Misael is back, still living out of a tin shack in the arid wilderness and still with a taste for armadillo meat. It seems almost a bit of a gag that someone like Alonso would turn this arthouse milestone into a franchise, and yet here we are with La Libertad Doble, which meticulously charts the continuing anti adventures of god’s lonely man while also adding some new formal distractions into the mix.
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Misael is a man who lives the most basic and cyclical existence imaginable, and the impression that the film gives is that, for him, this is also a utopia – perhaps not to the point were he is elated with his lot in life, but that he has attained a level of control and routine that allows him to feel contented. When he’s not chopping down dried tree branches which he then delicately sculpts with his oversized chainsaw, he’s roasting hunks of meat, some of which he’ll toss out to his dog which also seems to have adjusted to the rhythms of life in this pastoral enclave.
The idyll is ruptured when Misael heads to the nearby town and is told by a local physician that all of their patients are being offloaded due to drastic funding cuts, and so Misael will need to assume guardianship of his autistic sister Micaela (Catalina Saavedra). In the same emotionally neutral mindset that he as assumed in this and the previous film, he takes on the responsibility and, suddenly he’s back home with a random plastic bag of meds and an extra mouth to feed.
The film is fascinating in the way it toys the viewer with it’s even more complex fusion of “real” and “fictional” elements, and there’s much fun to be had not only in contrasting the performance styles of the two protagonists, but also trying to discern whether “performance” is the even the correct term for what we’re seeing. The film also contains an allegoric richness, speaking of a country where the working/labour classes are loaded with increasing social burdens. But, by its final moments, there’s something quite exciting about the fact that the film may actually be Alonso’s statement saying that it may be time to wrap things up and find some new angles when it comes to doc-fiction hybrid filmmaking.
