New York-based writer-director Amalia Ulman returns to her Argentine roots for her second feature, and as in the Spain-set El Planeta, she’s keenly interested in the boundless human capacity for living in a state of denial. Revolving around a group of supposed journalists — well, content creators — who spend the entire movie missing a huge story right under their noses, Magic Farm features a stupendous cast fully in sync with Ulman’s deadpan absurdity. The actors effortlessly entwine the droll and the ingenuous, but as Ulman juggles more characters and more plot angles than in her first movie, there isn’t necessarily more payoff.
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The ambling action begins with a quintet of cranky New Yorkers arriving at a rustic hotel in the middle of the Argentine countryside in the middle of the night. They don’t quite know it yet, but these variously lost souls are literally lost: They’re in the wrong South American country. A media crew reporting on such “crazy subcultures” as Mexican pointy boots and Bolivian teen exorcists, they’ve come in search of a bunny-ear-wearing singer who’s gone relatively viral. Thanks to some lackadaisical online research, they’ve missed their target by one or two national borders. But they do at least have a talent for improvisation, and as they settle in to tiny San Cristóbal, their antennae are up for a substitute trend to document, if only to salvage their professional pride and justify the expense of the trip. As one of them remarks, “We’ve been full of shit before.”
Magic Farm
If this bunch seem vaguely disheartened from the get-go, it might be because their company bears the painfully generic name Creative Lab; this is an enterprise driven by a business model, not an artistic vision. Among the five Lab rats are two bosses: onscreen personality Edna (Chloë Sevigny) and Dave (Simon Rex), her partner in business and life, who soon skedaddles back to the States to deal with some legal matters that everyone but Edna is aware of. Between Dave’s whiny petulance, Edna’s glum watchfulness and their performative mwah-mwah kisses, this couple is a walking talking warning sign.
Their three young crewmembers juggle a bit of everything, jobwise. Sound guy Justin (Joe Apollonio, in an auspicious shift from TV roles) rocks a ’70s aesthetic with exuberant sweetness and a dimness so pure it positively shines. Cameraperson Elena (Ulman), his good friend and the group’s closest thing to a grown-up, after Edna, is guarding a few secrets, both personal and company-related. She’s also the only Spanish speaker on the team. At the far opposite end of the adulthood spectrum is Jeff (Alex Wolff), a floppy mess of romantic misadventures and extravagant self-involvement and possibly the world’s most distracted producer. No less than 13 international cities are listed on his business card, indicative of this pack’s delusions of globetrotting grandeur.
The rural small town in which they find themselves is surrounded by farmland, and home to an evangelical apocalyptic temple as well as a canine population that apparently outnumbers the human one. Popa (Valeria Lois), an unemployed event organizer and costume maker, becomes the trio’s guide. Her friend Mateo (Mateo Vaquer Ruiz de los Llanos) pops in and out of the story, an intriguing performer whose apparent aging disease is never mentioned. Popi’s daughter, Manchi (Camila Del Campo), who speaks English and knows what she wants, ignites Jeff’s pheromones big-time, and vice versa, but nothing with him is simple.
The most affecting thread in this multistrand saga is the shy flirtation between Justin and the guileless hotel receptionist (Guillermo Jacubowicz), a devoted single dad whose backstory is conveyed with admirable concision.
Amid all the visitors’ imported dramas and broken Spanish, the town’s constant reality of childhood illness registers not at all with them. Nor do they notice such details as the brown tap water. It’s on a more personal level that San Cristóbal gets under their skin, and as the final sequence makes clear, in a way that they’ve never before experienced on any of their Creative Lab assignments.
El Planeta unfolded in a crisp black-and-white that suited its wryness, but here the screen is drenched in color — the acid pop of the greens is especially notable and, within the context of the story, significant. With her returning DP (Carlos Rigo Bellver) and composer (Chicken, aka Burke Battelle), Ulman injects the proceedings with playful visual touches, including fisheye lens views and dog-level shots, and buoyant musical passages. (Also returning is Ale Ulman, the director’s mother and her terrific Planeta co-star, delivering a brief, bright turn, late in the proceedings, opposite Sevigny’s exhausted and demoralized Edna.)
An artist who has worked in a variety of media, Amalia Ulman is an inventive filmmaker. Her screenplay contains sharp observations and delightful zingers, tossed off with comic precision by the ace cast. It also sometimes drifts into asides that sap the story’s momentum. Maybe the fizzling stretches in Magic Farm are reflections of the central characters’ state of mind, expressions of their meandering attempts to make something coherent out of a near fiasco. If so, that’s ambitious, and certainly tricky to pull off. I would have liked to be more fully in this wild, smart adventure from beginning to end. And I’m eager to see what its creator does next.
