The Dependent (1969)

Original title

El dependiente

Directed by

Leonardo Favio

Genre

drama film

Country

Argentina

Runtime

1h 27m

Rating

7.0 of 10 from 14 voters

Elsewhere

IMDb

How it feels

In a small provincial town, a lonely hardware store assistant falls in love with a mysterious woman who lives with her mother. The film follows his quiet and obsessive pursuit of her affection.

melancholicslow-burnlonelylongingintrospectivequietbroodingisolated

What happens

El dependiente (Spanish for "the shop assistant" but also "the dependent") is a 1969 Argentine drama film directed by Leonardo Favio and starring Graciela Borges, Walter Vidarte, Fernando Iglesias and Nora Cullen. It is based on the short story of the same name by Jorge Zuhair Jury, Favio's brother and frequent collaborator, with whom he also co-wrote the screenplay alongside Roberto Irigoyen. Set in a small provincial town, the film tells the story of Mr. Fernández, a lonely shop assistant in a hardware store that falls in love with Miss Plasini, a mysterious and isolated woman who lives with her mother. It is the last installment of an unofficial trilogy of films Favio made in the 1960s, after Crónica de un niño solo (1965) and El romance del Aniceto y la Francisca (1967), which have earned him recognition as one of the most important auteurs of Argentine cinema, despite not being so well known outside the country. The film was produced by Leopoldo Torre Nilsson through his company Contracuadro, and was shot in the spring of 1968 in the then small town of Derqui, in the Pilar district of the province of Buenos Aires. Upon completion, El dependiente was screened in the main competition of the 1968 San Sebastián Film Festival, where it received the Cine Nuevo (English: New Cinema) award and an honorable mention from the Federation of Cine Clubs of Spain, and the Cartagena Film Festival, where it received the award for best film. The film had its commercial release on 1 January 1969 at the Paramount and Libertador theaters in Buenos Aires. Like Favio's previous films, El dependiente was well-received by critics but a box-office failure, which prompted the director to reinvent himself as a successful popular singer. At the 1970 Argentine Film Critics Awards, Vidarte received the Silver Condor Award for Best Actor and Cullen the Silver Condor Award for Best Supporting Actress. In 2000, it was selected as the 14th greatest Argentine film of all time in a poll conducted by the Museo del Cine Pablo Ducrós Hicken. In a new version of the survey organized in 2022 by the specialized magazines La vida util, Taipei and La tierra quema, presented at the Mar del Plata International Film Festival, the film reached the 4th position. In 2022, a print of the film was declared of National Artistic Interest by the Argentine government, along with other Favio films that were part of the holdings of a company that went bankrupt that passed to the protection of the National Commission for Monuments, Places and Historical Property. (from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA)

Trailer

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