Released the same year as Vertigo (1958), and similarly driven by sexual obsession, psychological delusion, narrative game-playing, and dream logic, the great Argentine director Mario Soffici’s late-career gem Rosaura at 10 O’Clock is playing in a new widescreen restoration at the Museum of Modern Art as part of the 21st edition of “To Save and Project.” But this is not just the North American premiere of the restoration. Though it ranks high on several critics’ lists of the country’s greatest 20th-century films, Rosaura at 10 O’Clock has—remarkably—never been shown in the United States. The restoration was a highlight of this year’s Cannes Classics section; the film premiered there in the 1958 Palme D’Or competition (which awarded top prizes to Mikhail Kalatozov’s The Cranes Are Flying and Jacques Tati’s Mon Oncle.)
Told largely in flashbacks by four contradictory and clearly unreliable narrators, the film starts as a boarding-house drama and social allegory, and ends up as a feverish film noir. The new resident, Camilo, is a shy, nervous middle-aged painter (played against type by the comedian Juan Verdaguer) who starts receiving perfumed love letters from a woman who—we are led to believe—is the beautiful daughter of a wealthy man who has hired Camilo to paint her portrait. Suffice it to say that there is a large gap between the Rosaura that Camilo describes and the woman who shows up at the front door of the boarding house one night at 10:00 p.m. Entrancing and mysteriously quiet, Rosaura—or whoever she is—is played by Susana Campos in a performance worthy of Kim Novak.
At one point, Milagro (María Luis Robledo), the meddlesome matriarch who runs the household, says “the more you look, the less you see.” This offhand comment is a key to the film, which is filled with competing versions of reality, from the perspectives of characters who have wildly different agendas. Camilo’s romance is revealed as a fiction designed to seduce one of Milagro’s daughters; another border, David (Alberto Dalbés), is a brooding intellectual who becomes hopelessly jealous and suspicious of Camilo; Rosaura is escaping from a sordid past; and a police detective is trying to make sense of all of the competing accounts that led to a murder.
But who is Mario Soffici? Unfamiliar with his other films, I asked the Argentine-American director Matías Piñeiro, who said “Mario Soffici is our Orson Welles, with his use of depth of field, and his play with ellipses in time and flashbacks. For many decades Rosaura was considered the number one Argentine film of all time. Now, other movies take that place: Invasión (1969) by Hugo Santiago and La Ciénega (2001) by Lucrecia Martel. Soffici brought modernism to Argentine cinema during the classic period of the 1950s.”
Adapted from the popular police thriller by Marco Denevi, who co-wrote the screenplay with Soffici, Rosaura at 10 O’Clock was an ideal fit for the director, who was drawn to crime stories and tales of unclear identity. With its frequent use of mirrors, claustrophobic compositions, and a visual style that becomes increasingly gothic, the film expresses these themes in visual terms. In a gesture that looks ahead to the more overt modernist films of the 1960s, Soffici repeats key moments several times, from different viewpoints, including Rosaura’s 10 o’clock arrival. Let’s hope there are more opportunities to see films by Soffici, who Piñiero credits with “cracking classical storytelling for Argentine cinema,” paving the way for exciting new approaches by the next generation of filmmakers.
Rosaura at 10 O’Clock screens this evening, January 13, and January 17, at the Museum of Modern Art as part of the series “To Save and Project.”
