Something Old, Something New, Something Borrowed
directed by Hernán Rosselli
starring Maribel Felpeto, Alejandra Cánepa, Hugo Felpeto, Juliana Simões Risso, Leandro Menendez, and Javier Abril Rotger
MPM Premium
“Never retrace your steps, you could burn your feet and never be able to walk again.”
The above sage advice handed down to Hugo Felpeto, the now-deceased patriarch of the small-time crime family at the center of Something Old, Something New, Something Borrowed (Algo nuevo, algo viejo, algo prestado), serves as an ominous threat throughout Hernán Rosselli’s impressively layered second hybrid-fiction feature. From the film’s opening moments that blend surveillance footage, real-life home movies by Hugo acquired by Rosselli, who was a longtime neighbor, and fictional scenes shot for the film, we bear witness to an innovative retracing of steps that lead to the present day where Felpeto’s wife, Alejandra, and daughter, Maribel, carry on the daily illicit activities of Hugo’s declining bookmaking business in their Lomas de Zamora neighborhood.
Providing the role as the film’s central narrator is Maribel (played by Maribel Felpeto), who struggles to live her life as a young woman while also teaming up with her adoring yet calculating mother, Alejandra (Alejandra Cánepa), to complete the daily tasks of running the family’s gambling operation, which includes bribing the local police and dealing with the encroachment on their territory by other families while also keeping an ear to the ground for the inevitable systematic raids on gambling operations being conducted by federal officers executing a mandate to solidify the dominance of Argentina’s national lottery.
Maribel’s responsibilities to her family include destroying documents that could be used as evidence against them if they are confiscated, breaking passwords, and searching through her late father’s laptop to determine if he has moved any money to secret accounts or unidentifiable locations. While looking through Hugo’s social media profile, Maribel unintentionally finds hints of a highly guarded family secret, which she looks into without her mother or her crime family members knowing. Subsequently, Maribel’s viewings of videos shot by her father of her own mother and herself as a child galvanize a feeling of a fabricated reality, and as more layers are peeled away, and Maribel discovers even more dark truths about those around her, she begins to question the meaning of family.
Hugo’s home videos provide little insight into his mental state except for his dubious desire to create the image of an idyllic, loving family in spite of his clandestine and possibly violent activities. But, they excel in helping to dissect Alejandra’s path. Through the lens of Hugo’s camera, we witness the dichotomy between the young, beautiful Alejandra, the blushing and diffident, yet highly intelligent bride who was initially conned into believing that her husband earned his money legally as a courier, and the compelling contemporary fictional portrayal of her character in the film, which is that of a self-assured woman who has taken on her husband’s Machiavellian ethos to new heights in order to run the family business.
This combination of historical footage and dramatic performance further blurs the boundaries between fact and fiction, reflecting our own comprehension of family as a collection of memories that are often enhanced and augmented by our emotional interpretations of actual occurrences. In conjunction with that particular blending of media forms, Rosselli’s use of security footage adds a layer of distance that subtracts from the emotions that we may be feeling towards Alejandra and Maribel’s harrowing predicament that was hoisted upon them by Hugo and persisted by a lack of knowing or imagining any other life.
In the end, the crime plot of Rosselli’s film becomes a means to an end to force us to challenge our notions of fantasy, memory, and reality and explore how such concepts cloud our attempts to understand the future. The family’s concentration on the past and today is important for their survival in the day ahead, but it prevents them from seeing the very real, impending future which contains the end of their bookmaking practice and a dire ultimatum for Maribel. Much like the ill-fated submarine crew in Wolfgang Petersen’s Das Boot, we know from history that the sword of Damocles hangs over the heads of the protagonists of Rosselli’s film. The raids carried out by the Argentine government, which are in place to symbolically protect the legitimized form of the same bookmaking that survives the residents of these small areas, will ultimately come down on the Felpeto family. Predicting the exact day of when the raids will come seems as futile an action as the entirety of their lives in the wake of Hugo’s suicide, which is noted in the film as an all-too-normal outcome for bookmakers in Argentina.
With sensational performances from its cast of non-professional actors and a personal tone and geography-related social commentary reminiscent of Jonas Carpignano’s recent triptych of Mediterranea, A Ciambra, and A Chiara, Something Old, Something New, Something Borrowed is as much a statement on our mental construction of family as it is a comment on present-day Buenos Aires, which seems trapped between a past it cannot escape and a nebulous future that holds few options for its citizens.
Featured photo courtesy of MPM Premium.
