Nominated for the Oscar for Best Foreign Film, Wild Tales did not win, but it was definitely the most entertaining movie in the field. Damián Szifrón’s collection of six short stories is about Argentinian people taking revenge on others who do them wrong, and it’s twistedly funny enough that Pedro Almodóvar signed on as a producer.
The brief opening segment on an airplane effectively sets the tone for better stories in the middle: a rich asshole in a new Audi (Leonardo Sbaraglia) and a poor asshole in an old heap (Walter Donado) engage in a murderous case of road rage on a deserted highway, the restaurant diner from hell (César Bordón) meets a cook (Rita Cortese) who’s itching to use her rat poison on a customer, and a sad-sack dad (Ricardo Darín) becomes a domestic terrorist after he’s given a parking ticket — apparently paying tickets in Argentina really is a Kafkaesque bureaucratic nightmare like we see here. This movie features some of its country’s greatest actors, but they’re all upstaged by newcomer Érica Rivas as a bride who discovers that her new husband has been screwing a hot co-worker and responds by heaping epic humiliation on him at the wedding reception, as well as sending the other woman to the hospital. The movie, whose title better translates as “savage stories,” plays at the Modern this weekend. Come sample the insanity.
[box_info]Wild Tales runs Fri-Sun at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, 3200 Darnell St, FW. Tickets are $7-9. Call 817-738-9215.[/box_info]
