By Haden Guest  

The latest film by Martín Rejtman reaffirms his singular place in Argentine and world cinema as one of the rare non-mainstream auteurs working today, with brio and invention, in the realm of comedy. Beginning with Rapado (1992),each of Rejtman’s fiction films have brought new formal complexity and philosophical depth to that broad and often dismissed genre through wryly detached, yet richly humorous, stories centred on haplessly charming heroes trying in vain to recover something unexpectedly lost—be it an object, a relationship, youth, or even identity itself. The Practice goes further by using its narrative of a yoga instructor, Gustavo (Esteban Bigliardi), re-evaluating his life while navigating a divorce and torn meniscus, to offer both a comic portrait of late-mid-life crisis and a self-reflexive distillation of Rejtman’s deadpan style and offbeat approach to narrative. 

Indeed, Rejtman’s humorously refracted focus upon yoga’s sustained physical and mental routine could be taken as a playful meditation on the rigorous restraint guiding his own filmmaking practice, which uses extended rehearsals to carefully define the precise cadence, rhythm, and movement of dialogue, gestures, and bodies onscreen. Rejtman’s films make great use of repetition, echoing motifs and dialogue to render them comically familiar and strange with each return. The almost musical cracking sound that accompanies Gustavo’s recurrent knee injury serves this purpose while also embodying how corporeal selves speak directly to the otherwise carefully understated political and philosophical levels at work within Rejtman’s deliberate estrangement of language. 

As an Argentine yoga instructor working in Chile, Gustavo is humorously marked out-of-place in a way that remains subtle to a non-citizen of the Southern Cone: his dialogue just slightly out of sync, despite Rejtman’s avoidance of the most obvious idiomatic differences between the Spanish spoken in the neighbouring countries. From the start of his career, Rejtman has avoided the pointed use of slang and colloquialisms embraced by contemporaries such as Adrian Caetano and Pablo Trapero, instead refining a neutral, halting Spanish that foregrounds borrowed words and mirrors the coolly detached, gently postmodern prose of his own short stories. While native speakers might detect a slight tonal difference in the dialogue of the Argentine and Chilean characters, Gustavo’s injured, unbalanced body more vividly expresses his displacement and struggle to adapt to his ever-changing situation, advancing age, and unexpected visits by his overbearing mother. 

Film comedy in its purest form is a corporeal art invented during the silent era in narratives told by bodies gliding and falling dexterously within and across the frame. Rejtman’s cinema taps (in)directly into this tradition by extending a mode of formally rigorous, modernist comedy best defined by Ozu and Tati, who both drew vital inspiration from slapstick and silent comedy. The Practice’s exacting mise en scène and crisp choreography of action and (non-)reaction also suggests the influence of Bresson, who began in comedy—with his little-known absurdist short Affairs publiques (1936)—and later made a revelatory contribution to the genre with Quatre nuits d’un rêveur (1971), an affectionate ode to youthful romanticism. Like these filmmakers, Rejtman gives minimal emphasis to dialogue or any declared character motivation, and instead diffuses narrative meaning across meticulously staging. Language and characters are mere elements within a larger and subtly polyvalent world in which seemingly minor objects and gestures exert a major presence, and in which exits and entrances seem to have as much meaning as the characters who pass through them. 

Rejtman also foregrounds and questions the expressivity of the body through ubiquitous signage, price tags, and the constant movement of automobiles and other vehicles. The places that recur in these filmmakers’ work seem to proscribe the kind of action that can take place within them—as in Ozu’s bars, Bresson’s cafes, Tati’s convention halls, and, in The Practice, Gustavo’s studio, which is marked with a laconic “Yoga” sign. Together, the world of overdetermined meaning defined by these directors’ films seems, moreover, to influence if not define human gestures and decisions, even the most existentially charged. For example, in Rejtman’s previous feature, Two Shots Fired (2014), a young man’s attempted suicide is foreshadowed by the sudden “death” of his flimsy electric lawnmower when he accidentally runs over its cord. 

The Practice draws deeply from Bresson and Ozu while also extending the existential searching of Two Shots Fired and the autobiographical turn that Rejtman made in the touchingly comic short Shakti (2019), his first to feature a Jewish protagonist. The comedies of Bresson and Ozu, especially Quatre nuits d’un rêveur and Good Morning (1959), are Rosetta Stones of sorts that give critical perspective on the larger worlds detailed by the filmmakers’ respective oeuvres. In Good Morning,Ozu uses the absurdly selfish protest of two obstreperous brothers, who refuse to speak to their parents after they are denied a television, to look askance at the ritualistic small talk of adults that is central to his cinema. In Quatre nuits d’un rêveur, a film-within-a-film reveals a gangster movie that sharply parodies Bresson’s austere and unrelenting style with a relentless violence that points towards the nihilistic apogee of L’argent (1983). In a similar manner, The Practice reflects upon Rejtman’s own cinema, and, in particular, the role of language and the expressive body within it. By literally limiting the expressive potential of the body, here in the figure of the injured yoga instructor, The Practice questions the limits and possibilities of the body as the fulcrum of cinematic meaning, a restraint that again echoes Ozu and Bresson by reaching towards a metaphysical and even spiritual mode of cinema. 

This new spiritual direction for Rejtman leads to an unexpected climax that takes place when Gustavo wanders away from a rural yoga retreat to spend the night deep in the woods, awakening to find the forest trembling while before him a huge bolder levitates above the ground. Whether this vision of the floating rock is actual or imagined is left unresolved: upon returning to the retreat to learn that no one else experienced the earthquake, Gustavo keeps the vision to himself. This private revelation suggests some version of samadhi, the highest, transcendent stage of Ashtanga yoga that Gustavo earlier confesses he has never attained. The scene also recalls the earthquake that opens the film as Gustavo is teaching in his studio, resulting in one of his female students being knocked on the head by a folding screen and losing her memory. That the student had just complained that he had been giving her unwanted attention, a charge Gustavo adamantly denies, suggests this too to be, on some level, a sort of private earthquake, and possibly a kind of wish fulfillment. 

Gustavo’s vision of the floating bolder is also juxtaposed by the most indelibly repeated comic motif in The Practice, onethat comes directly from the neo-silent cinema of Tati: Gustavo walks into an open manhole while talking with a woman he is hesitantly courting. Although Gustavo is taking it slow, trying for once to define a non-dysfunctional partnership, his tumbling body gives comically literal expression to the fact that he seems, nevertheless, to be falling in love. The law of gravity defied by the mysterious rock is confirmed by Gustavo’s pratfall and absurd embodiment of a fallen man reaching for enlightenment. The sense of a deeper logic and tissue connecting the intertwined movements of characters and objects has always been at work across Rejtman’s films, but usually in terms of a kind of market economy defined by the circular transactions that animate Silvia Prieto (1999) and The Magic Gloves (2003),two works that partially speak to the disastrous neoliberal economics transforming Argentine society. In The Practice,Rejtman explores a different kind of spiritual connection between his characters, who are almost all yoga practitioners and together comprise a kind of family of searchers and stumblers who likewise suffer similar pratfalls and abrupt reversals of fortune.

In fact, Gustavo’s tumble is based on Rejtman’s actual fall into an open manhole in Santiago, an accident that convinced him he had to make The Practice there, his first film outside of Argentina. The more personal, intimate inflection of The Practice is further signalled by its partially autobiographical inspiration in the filmmaker’s own decades-long practice of Ashtanga yoga, and the uncanny physical resemblance that led him to cast Esteban Bigliardi as Gustavo. Taken as a statement about Rejtman’s own practice as a filmmaker, his new film could also be read as a meditation on art cinema itself, which, like yoga, is a refined discipline requiring long study and dedication, but is also a precarious business, dependent entirely on elaborate financing and the resolution and vision of its maker. That Rejtman remains underappreciated outside of Argentina despite his tremendous influence over subsequent generations of directors is a stark reminder of the Sisyphean work of the independent auteur, who must find a way to push huge rocks up mountains or, simply, find a way to make them levitate.  

Haden Guest