In a Reflective Mood

On memoir movies and surveillance dramas with "The Beaches of Agnès" and "Gigante."

Adrián Biniez’s “Gigante” is modest as well, unsurprisingly for a Uruguayan indie, but differently — it can best be evoked as a South American Aki Kaurismäki comedy. Which is to say, you get the laughs wherever you can find them, amid the sober rhythms and stoic performances. It’s classic indie territory — a lonely, obese and uncommunicative supermarket security guard (Horacio Camandule) in Montevideo gradually emerges from a dead-end routine and becomes engaged by life due to his crush on one of the cavernous store’s cleaning women (Leonor Svarcas), whom he observes only through surveillance cameras.

Biniez’s full-frontal camera placement and precocious sense of waiting for something bad to happen in any given shot provide the real action, because the characters are numb and sullen, and most of the story is made up by watching. Literally, Camandule’s sleepy-eyed, hulking hero spends most of the film trying to breach the divide he feels between himself, in the store’s surveillance booth, and the store’s after-hours action, which he monitors like an impassive God but cannot get the nerve up to enter.

In this way, it’s a deadpan-romance sibling-film to Andrea Arnold’s “Red Road,” and a part of a lineage that began with “Rear Window” and may become, in the oncoming decades, one of the dominant social dynamics of our world, the tension between watching others, being watched and realizing that neither is the same as living.

Camandule’s lug does engage, eventually, and Biniez keeps the falling dominoes — from decimated toilet paper displays to nose punches to the crisis of layoffs to a store-wrecking frenzy — at a satiric distance, making us wait out the suspense or discomfort of uncertainty in every off-screen moment. It’s a strategy the hero suffers from as well — at one point, suspicious of a liaison involving the girl, he tries to follow her from one camera view to another through the back halls and stairwells, and loses her somewhere in between the “windows” of seeing.

Free of “acting,” mapped out visually with an architect’s scruples, and confident in its dry-as-toast charm, “Gigante” is a small movie in every way, and lacks Kaurismäki’s formal subversiveness and tongue-in-cheek ambition, but for its peculiar and completely contemporary subgenre, it’s a prize.

“The Beaches of Agnès” (Cinema Guild) and “Gigante” (Film Movement) are now available on DVD.

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