Lázaro at Night
(Canada/Mexico, 76 min.)
Dir. Nicolás Pereda
Programme: Wavelengths (North American premiere)
Like the other films of Mexican-Canadian filmmaker Nicolás Pereda, Lazaro at Night is an invitation. It’s a proposition, or challenge, that lures us with enigmatic configurations where tolerance for discomfort and absurdity is tested at great lengths. Expanding upon his conceptual but grounded world in Fauna (2020)—or perhaps constructing a new one in its parallel—Pereda recasts frequent collaborators Lázaro Gabino Rodriguez, Luisa Pardo Úrias, and Francisco Barreiro as figures in a love triangle who happen to share names with their characters. The plot, insofar as there is one, follows the three aspiring actors, friends, and lovers auditioning for a filmmaker with an unconventional approach to casting, capturing the romantic and professional tensions that arise as a result.
We find the director seated in a cafe twice, first with Lázaro, then with Luisa, imparting his belief that aptitude for portraying a character can be gleaned from everyday gestures. As his candidates each pick up their glass of water, he confesses that this meeting is the test: their manner of movement reveals everything he needs to know. To embrace the natural idiosyncracies and mannerisms of an actor is to welcome their embodied histories, to incorporate reality into the realm of myth. Like his characters, Pereda is invested in collapsing boundaries between fiction and non-fiction, weaving autobiographical elements of his actors into his characters and staging moments of role play to take up questions of performance and identity. Here, and in other moments, the film delicately folds in on itself with pleasurable moments of repetition and variation that unsettle us from traditional viewing relations.
To be sure, the film is best appreciated with knowledge of the prolific auteur’s previous works, but the fragmented, elliptical scenarios in Pereda’s latest film gladly serve as an introduction to his dreamy, self-reflexive creations. It could be said that Lázaro at Night is about the jealousies within creative communities, or the complications of romantic predicaments, but mostly, the film affirms that anyone is capable of being an artist, and that life itself is a work of art.
