Los Angeles Film Festival

The Seven Madmen

Los siete locos

(Argentina, 1973, 120 mins, 35mm)

Producers: Leopoldo Torre Nilsson, José Slavin
Screenwriters: Luis Pico Estrada, Mirtha Arlt, Beatriz Guido, Leopoldo Torre Nilsson
Cinematographer: Aníbal di Salvo
Editors: Antonio Ripoll, Armando Blanco
Cast: Alfredo Alcón, Norma Aleandro, Héctor Alterio, Thelma Biral, Sergio Renán, José Slavin, Leonor Manso
Music: Mariano Etkin

Argentine writer Roberto Arlt, whose novels were first published in the 1920s and '30s, was rediscovered by the “boom” generation of Latin American writers such as Gabriel García Márquez forty years later, and Leopoldo Torre Nilsson’s effective adaptation of his most famous novel is an ode to Arlt’s subversive qualities.

As played by Alfredo Alcón, Erdosian is a weak, largely defeated man. Searching for something that will give his existence meaning, Erdosain thinks he’s found the answer in the ravings of a pseudo-astrologer whose reading of the stars tells him that the imminent destruction of society as we know it is at hand. As Erdosain is increasingly drawn into the astrologer's unsettling circle—a kind of curious terrorist underground of deadbeats and fantasists—Arlt describes the Buenos Aires of the Twenties as a haven (and terminus) for the world’s malcontents. Torre Nilsson updates the idea to present instead a portrait of a society unmoored, one that’s lost any sense of direction. Argentina in the Seventies‾

Richard Peña

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