Essay: El affaire Miu Miu (2024)
A sort of coda to one of the best films of 2022
Mui-Mui, a division of the Italian fashion company Prada, sponsors a series of luxuriously produced short films by women directors.1 Last year’s production, “I am the Beauty of Your Beauty, I am the Fear of Your Fear” by Chinese exile director Chui Mui Tan, was an arresting look at a group of women studying mixed martial arts. I saw it on the streaming service Mubi. I’m not sure whether Mubi mentioned anything about its inclusion in the Miu-Miu series; if they did, I didn’t notice it. Nor did the women in the film wear any high fashion knits, as the film was set in Malaysia and every character was constantly drenched in sweat.
This year’s release in the series, directed by El Pampero Cine’s2 Laura Citarella, is impossible to separate from the fashion brand. The brand name is in the title “El Affaire Miu Miu,” and the company’s clothes appear throughout, both on a statuesque model who is invited to a small Argentine city to model them and on the film’s other characters, men and women alike. If ever a filmmaker could be accused of selling out, of making what is almost a commercial about its sponsor’s wares, this would be the time. And yet…
I want to say “And yet ….” I want to say that the film transcends its commercial character. I want to say that it’s a beautiful film regardless of these commercial ties.
Because I am really biased. A year ago I saw the same director’s epic four-hour “Trenque Lauquen,” a pastoral mystery set in the small city of that name, and I was swept away by its unique counter-narrative strategies and its feminist character.3 In the year since then, I’ve discovered the El Pampero Cine filmmaking collective, the company of actresses who appear in many of the films made by its directors as well as those of directors not officially part of the collective, and a lot of beguiling and fascinating examples of what is called New Argentine Cinema. It wouldn’t be putting it too strongly to say that I was inspired by these works beyond the usual respect and appreciation that a film reviewer — I wouldn’t exalt myself by calling myself a critic — would possess.
In short, I’ve become a fan, and to the extent that I am one, I’m extremely biased toward loving these movies. I’m not objective, I’m not qualified to deliver a critical judgment. On the other hand, nobody is really paying attention to this short film. (It didn’t even have a plot summary on IMDB until I submitted one.) And I wouldn’t ordinarily review a short film — this is 30 minutes; I didn’t review "I am the Beauty of Your Beauty, I am the Fear of Your Fear" for that exact reason, even though I really liked it.
So here we go. First of all, we are back in Trenque Lauquen, an obscure town in the pampas west of Buenos Aires.4 It’s mid-June — i.e. winter. As in the longer film, a woman has disappeared. In this case it’s the fashion model Caterina (Guillermina Villa Simón) who has come to model the Miu Miu clothes and accessories. Several women, including a detective, María José (Verónica Llinás), the local police chief Delia (Juliana Muras), and her clairvoyant assistant Lidia (Laura Paredes), investigate the disappearance.
The primary evidence, besides several traffic and security cameras that catch the statuesque Caterina striding decisively through and out of town, are the clothes and accessories she was meant to model, left behind in a vacant mansion. “The Italians,” i.e. the Miu Miu company, want the clothes back, but the investigators declare them to be evidence and refuse.
The women’s investigation is, perhaps, less focused and direct than it would be if this were a crime thriller and a man were in charge. Here the case proceeds in a more circuitous manner. Chicho (Ezequiel Pierri), a rumpled local man who organized the whole visit by the fashion house, acted as Caterina’s driver, and was the last person to see her, might be the prime suspect in that more traditional, patriarchal movie. But here, following an interrogation that seems almost desultory, the women dismiss him. When he tries to tell them he feels bad about the disappearance, María José pats him on the back and says gently, “Nobody is thinking about you, Chicho.”
Instead, the left-behind clothes beguile the women — not in some fantastical or magical way, but as attractive objects they, as middle class South Americans, are completely unaccustomed to seeing in real life. As the movie goes on, they take to wearing the coats, gloves and jewelry, even while tramping around the countryside. As a reviewer, I felt ambivalent about this turn. While one can hardly expect a movie sponsored by a fashion company to ignore the company’s products, there is a moment when Delia the police chief and Lidia5 the clairvoyant are sizing up Miu Miu coats in exactly the same way women would be depicted doing so in a movie set in an American mall. (It is also a comic moment, as a red coat seen on Caterina earlier in the film is measured against the shoulders of Lidia, who is about a foot shorter.) Later, the rumpled Chicho suddenly appears with a beard trim, a new haircut, and a fashionable trench coat to replace the parka he evidently lived in up to that point, while María José has fastened several elaborate brooches to her coat for a hike in the countryside.
Just as a call from the Italians comes to say that Caterina has been found — she’s returned to Italy and has been asleep with jet lag after the long flight back to Europe — Lidia, the clairvoyant, says she’s finally seen Caterina — and that she’s not in Europe, but still out wandering the pampas. Vested in the wares left behind by the model, the three women set out across an untracked valley of crumpled winter grasses, following Lidia’s vision, still on Caterina’s trail.
I think the key to the movie is this: The pampas strike Caterina, a profoundly urban creature, as an otherworldly domain; her departure is less an escape than it is a journey of curiosity. In several interviews, Citarella says that the films try to capture a sense of the thrill of adventure, and it’s this spirit that inspires the model’s flight. As for the investigators, their embrace of the Miu Miu costumery clothes them with both an affinity for the company’s missing representative and an outer shell that engages them with the same world she finds herself in. For her, it’s another planet; for the investigators, it’s their backyard; but they all go out with a similar sense of adventure.
El Pampero Cine, a collective of filmmakers who collaborate on each other’s films and who stress the importance of “practicing cinema” by getting behind the camera as much and as often as possible. Their website: http://elpamperocine.com.ar/ An article about them: https://www.sensesofcinema.com/2024/22-years-of-el-pampero-cine/22-years-of-el-pampero-cine-trailblazing-independent-cinema-in-argentina/
Here’s my review of “Trenque Lauquen”:
In an interview also available on the Miu Miu page for the movie, director Laura Citarella explains that “El Affaire Miu Miu” was shot during, or just after, the last shooting dates for “Trenque Lauquen.” The town is the hometown of Citarella’s family and offered connection which simplified the filmmaking process, which in the case of the four-hour “Trenque Lauquen” stretched over six years.
Anagrammatical names (here, Lidia and Delia; in “The Delinquents,” Morán, Román, Norma, and Morna (and, in a nod to the joke itself, a jump-cut to the cover of the Marvel comic Namor the Sub-Mariner) seem to be a running joke among New Argentine Cinema writers. I reviewed “The Delinquents” here:
