Pentimentum
2021 · 27m · Uruguay
Directed by Fernando de la Torre, Mario Laguarda
Genres: drama, mystery, romance
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tender
An older man discovers, in the window of an antique shop, a painting of a woman very similar to an old girlfriend, a relationship that failed because of him and whom he never forgot; disconcerted by the impressive resemblance, he decides to go in and ask the enigmatic antiquarian he will find there about the origin of that painting, and the events that unfold there will make him think about lost opportunities and second chances.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
It's a ghost story wrapped in a parlor-room mystery wrapped in a romance about regret—which should be insufferable, but the antiquarian's silence does something genuinely unsettling to the whole machinery that conventional melodrama would've curdled.
The film's formal discipline—its commitment to the painting as both MacGuffin and mirror, the measured pacing that refuses catharsis—situates it squarely in a lineage of European chamber pieces that understand how composition and restraint become moral statements about loss.
The decision to keep the antiquarian's face obscured for most of the runtime, letting Fernando de la Torre carry the entire emotional weight through micro-expressions while the camera holds on the painting itself, is the hinge the whole thing turns on.