EMPTY NEST (Daniel Burman). 91 minutes. Subtitled. Opens Friday (July 3). For venues and times, see Movies. Rating: NNN
The Argentine writer/director Daniel Burman makes tidy little movies about people and emotions. Parents figure out how to connect to their kids, young men find their place in the world, while older men endure mid-life crises – no big whoop.[rssbreak]
Empty Nest tracks the bumps in the marital road between a middle-aged Buenos Aires couple after their daughter leaves for college.
Martha (Cecilia Roth) decides to reinvent herself by going back to school and engaging with the world her husband Leonardo (Oscar Martínez), a well-known playwright, grows distant, retreating into daydreams and contemplating an affair with his dentist.
As he demonstrated with Lost Embrace and Family Law, Burman isn’t the sort of filmmaker to pile on complications or contrivances for the sake of drama. He’s a much gentler storyteller, content to set his characters before us and let them figure out their own problems. The downside to that approach is that his films have a way of evaporating as soon as you leave the theatre.
If you’ve seen Burman’s previous films, there won’t be much here that seems new. But most Torontonians haven’t seen them, so they’re in a position to get more out of this quietly witty feature.
