Cara de Queso

Yesterday I felt like giving my Spanish a run with a subtitle-free movie. And obviously, I wanted to choose something local. I had seen some posters around town for a movie called Cara de Queso , which looked sufficiently funny and light to not be too hard for a non-Spanish speaker, so I decided to go for it.

At first glance, from the poster, it looked like some sort of Spanish Napoleon Dynamite rip-off. But it was far from it.

It as the story of a young Jewish boy named Ariel from Buenos Aires. Every summer his family escapes the heat of the city at their country, which is the Spanish word borrowed from English describing, from what I can gather, something like a country club slash gated community slash family summer camp. You have your golf course, pools, sports facilities, organized activites, etc, like in a country club, but there are a bunch of houses there, where people live for the summer. Sort of like a summer cottage, but not necessarily in the middle of the woods or on the beach. The particular country featured in the film was an exclusive Jewish club for Jewish families only.

The film underlines the parallel between the Jewish ghettos that used to exist in Eastern Europe and the self-created Jewish ghettos, such as this country club, that exist today. Though it was basically a mid- 90's coming of age story of this pre-teen boy and the wacky antics of him and his gang of friends, there were themes of exclusion and inclusion and abuse of power and being a minory woven throughout. So it was a little more enriching than your typical teen movie. Which showed in the crowd that came to see it, which included many middle-aged members of the very Buenos Aires Jewish community that the film examines.

(And in movie theatres here, you get an assigned seat! Of course, some old man was sitting in my seat, so I had to sit in someone else's seat...chaos could have ensued, but thankfully the theatre wasn't full...)