About Thirty (Martín Shanly, 2023)

Formalist comedies. Apparently they're still allowed, at least for now. Although About Thirty is organized as a character study, it's really more of a self-incriminating highlight reel of fuck-ups, misjudgments, and faux pas, most of them stemming from relatively innocent intentions. Arturo (Shanly) is an under-employed millennial adult, still relying on financial support from his parents, and driven by a thinly veiled passive-aggressive streak. The film picks up during the Covid-19 lockdown in Buenos Aires, but moves back and forth in time, detailing how Arturo managed to alienate his best friend Dafne (Camila Dougall), piss off his housemate Nico (Ivo Colonna Olsen), antagonize his surly younger sister Olivia (Julia Ezcurra), and on the night of Dafne's wedding, make an ill-advised drunken play to get back with his ex-boyfriend, who he refers to only a Voldemort (Pedro Merlo).

So far, most Covid films, let alone most Covid comedies, are incapable of saying anything meaningful about the pandemic or its psychological toll. It's probably about distance and perspective. After all, there were dozens of awful 9/11 films, and only one 25th Hour. But About Thirty gets something right about the pandemic, and especially the lockdown. There are some of us who are pretty socially inept, and being forcibly removed from all social activity was, if not a boon, at the very least a mental palate cleanser. And while in the flashbacks we get the sense that Arturo lacks a certain self-awareness, Shanly also makes it clear that Arturo is looking back at these mishaps from the relative "safety" of lockdown. Some folks learned to knit during Covid, others practiced the guitar, but Arturo seems to be learning how to be a functioning human being.

It's not that Arturo's a bad guy, really. He is just stuck in an arrested development on several levels. His inability to get over having been dumped by Voldemort leaves him emotionally paralyzed, constantly trying to figure out what went wrong. But then, we briefly see Arturo in a job interview that his mother set up for him, and he's comically diffident. "Do you know how to use Excel?" "Uh, no." Then a cut back to his conversation with his mom. "I don't know what happened." What happened, of course, is that Arturo exhibits no real interest in life, and this makes him a drag (for his family and closes friends) or, in the larger social scene, an afterthought.

So when Arturo commits his single biggest faux pas, bringing Dafne's wedding to a halt with his drunken behavior, it's not as though he's a dear friend screwing up lovably. He's the screw-up screwing up more profoundly, making a situation in which he is peripheral at best all about him, in the most grotesque possible way. Shanly's use of time-shifting, selective framing, and expect comic pacing, make for a funny film, to be sure. But more than this, they work together to create a Cubist portrait of a ridiculous man, slowly coming to terms with who he is. As the saying goes, if all you meet are assholes, it's quite possible that the asshole is you.