Christopher de la Torre

Victor, Edgardo Cozarinsky’s character in Ronda Nocturna (“Night Watch”) takes me back to My Own Private Idaho, and more recently Bad Education (Pedro Almovodar’s masterpiece), both seminal films in the gay gigolo genre.

Getting to know Victor is not only pleasurable, but you truly miss him once the credits begin to roll. Night Watch joins the stable of films that pull us in with sight and smell – those delicious senses that position our every memory.

My September 3 review:

In The Fall, Albert Camus wrote, “It always seemed to me that our fellow citizens had two passions: ideas and fornication. . . I sometimes think of what future historians will say of us. A single sentence will suffice for modern man: he fornicated and read the papers.”

The main character of Ronda Nocturna (“Night Watch”) is an enthusiastically affected hustler who vigorously fits this description. Victor is a young man who thinks too much, and incidentally makes a living by having sex with strangers. Night. Busy city streets. Garbage pickers. Street vendors. Argentine director Edgardo Cozarinsky unfolds a seemingly haphazard narrative involving hustlers, police Inspectors, and Ambassadors against an authentic Buenos Aires backdrop. Victor is good at what he does and he enjoys doing it, but one night, witnessing death firsthand forces him to re-evaluate his life. The only problem with this protagonist’s newly-discovered conflict is that we never get to dig deeper than a bewildered look or eerie transition, save one intense scene in which Victor is smothered in a hotel room by the object of his affection.

Still, we are introduced to a colorful montage of strange characters and quirky situations that lend themselves more to reality than we are perhaps ready to accept, giving the film a sort of Pedro Almovodar or Gus Van Sant feel. And the fact that we genuinely sympathize with Victor (I found myself at one point mimicking his smile) by the film’s outro, gives solid testament to Cozarinsky’s precise storytelling abilities, as well as the viability of his minimalist directing style.

The most noted performance comes from Moro Anguileri, playing the estranged ex-lover Cecila, who proves that hell indeed hath no fury than a woman scorned, especially when there’s a wire hanger involved. Gregory Dayton plays the police Inspector, who protects Victor in exchange for sex in parked cars, and Rafael Ferro plays Mario, an old friend of Victor’s whose tour of hooker row results in a solicitation from a Margaret Thatcher impersonator — perhaps the most humorous scene in the film.

Cozarinsky’s story of nocturnal excess is a tale that inadvertently bridges the class gap, raises questions of morality, mortality, all the while blurring the lines of sexuality. Whether the attempt on Victor’s life, and his near death experiences are real or imagined, is incidental. Night Watch shows us that sometimes the events of one night don’t necessarily need a beginning, middle, and end to engage us from scene to scene. These events follow the random style by which the protagonist lives, lacking structure or cohesion, constantly plagued with uncertainty. It’s a formula that reads less like prose, and more like poetry.

Like the winding streets of Buenos Aires, the story has to lead somewhere. But even the patient viewer may try to look for something that’s not there. The magic in this film happens when we learn to let go, proving that, sometimes, it’s better just to watch.

Read my review on Edge