The Girl from Uruguay (2023)

The Girl from Uruguay follows a Buenos Aires writer in the midst of an existential crisis who, during a trip to Montevideo to collect payment for writing a novel, encounters a young admirer 20 years his junior. It’s a prospect that briefly lifts his spirits amidst his marital crisis but soon forces him to confront himself.

Directed by the Argentine filmmaker Ana Garcia Blaya (known for “The Good Intentions”), “The Girl from Uruguay” is an adaptation of Pedro Mairal’s celebrated novel. Fun, fresh, sensitive, and at times, sharp, the film is a powerful tale about learning to reconcile the lives we have with the ones we wish for, and with all the unfulfilled promises.

The Girl from Uruguay (La Uruguaya) is a 2022 film directed by Ana García Blaya. It is produced by the Orsai Community (Comunidad Orsai in Spanish) led by Argentine author Hernán Casciari and Christian «Chiri» Basilis. It’s the film adaptation of Pedro Mairal’s “The Uruguayan” novel published in 2016, which achieved remarkable commercial success.

The film was financed through crowdfunding. To finance the film production, the Community released six thousand bonds at a unit price of 100 dollars each, and all members were allowed to buy up to 200 bonds each, thus becoming associate producers. The film profits will be distributed proportionally with all associate producers based on their number of bonds. All bonds were purchased within the first two months, and the film was fully financed before any other production first steps, including producer, film director or any other staff was employed or selected.

Community Orsai launched at the start of the production a website and a mobile app to which only associate producers and staff could log in; in it, creative discussions take place, creative polls are run, and associate producers can join video calls where staff discuss production topics, such art direction, script, and finance.

There is a weekly podcast featuring interviews, production news featuring cast members, and live streaming sessions with the staff. Frequently associate producers can join video calls via Zoom between staff and cast, and associate producers were allowed to join the production as extras during the shooting, furthering the unique production approach to this film.

Film Review for The Girl from Uruguay

The Girl from Uruguay tells a story about middle-aged male angst may not be especially original, but Pedro Mairal’s bittersweet meditation on love, sexual desire and ageing skewers the absurdity and the pain. His narrator is Lucas, a 44-year-old Argentinian writer, in debt and uninspired. He plays house-husband to his successful wife, Catalina, whom he suspectsof having an affair.

The answer to all his troubles, Lucas believes, is the $15,000 advance from his Spanish publisher, which he plans to cash in a bank on a day trip to the Uruguayan capital Montevideo, and exchange for pesos on the black market back in Buenos Aires. Also in Montevideo on the day Lucas visits is Guerra, the seductive young woman he met at a literary festival. He arranges an afternoon tryst and behaves like a besotted teenager.

Mairal is alert to the nuances of a midlife crisis – the loss of dignity, the abandonment of reason – and his descriptions of Lucas getting drunk, stoned and tattooed, while fixated on bedding Guerra, are pitch-perfect. Lucas admits his infatuation with Guerra was easy to sustain because he controlled the fantasy: “All those months I had you in my head and could rewind you, fast-forward you, pause you. I’d open and close the emails you’d send me.” Later, on the brink of having his desire fulfilled, he describes the thrill of escaping himself: “she ran her hand over the back of my neck, and it sent an electric charge all the way down my back. She reset me. I forgot everything, my name.”

As we are frequently reminded, Mairal’s promiscuous protagonist is a writer (the narrative is confessional) and his thoughts never cease – he eavesdrops on others, questions his motives, ponders banalities. In a flash of self-awareness, Lucas observes: “I wanted to live. To see, to touch. To get inside reality. Get inside Guerra. Get into a war with my fucking imagination, my eternal invisible world.”

By the end of this psychologically astute novella, translated sensitively by Jennifer Croft, Lucas recognises how quickly cracks in a relationship become chasms and that the key to happiness is acceptance.

The Girl from Uruguay (2023)

La Uruguaya