Últimas imágenes del naufragio (1989)

Roberto is fed up with the routine and emotional emptiness of his life in Buenos Aires. Every day, he rides a crowded subway between his home, where his marriage is unhappy, and his dreary job in an office downtown. His only dream is to write a novel. But he needs to find an idea for it so he can give his life meaning. One day, as he leaves work and waits on the subway platform, Roberto sees a beautiful young woman about to throw herself in front of an approaching train. He hurries to help her, comforts her, and offers to take her to dinner. During the meal, Roberto learns that her name is Estela, and she confesses that she never actually intended to throw herself in front of the train; it is just her usual trick for finding clients. Instead of getting upset, Roberto reacts with great enthusiasm, realizing that Estela could be the perfect character for the novel he has wanted to write for so long. He offers to pay her regularly, not for sex, but so she can tell him about her life and her thoughts. Using this material, Roberto begins writing the novel, with Estela as its protagonist. She tells him that she lives far away with her three brothers and their mother. Soon afterward, Roberto and Estela set off by train and bus so he can meet her family, who live in a nearly ruined house beyond the railway line’s last stop. Their family life is a dead end, and they have always been on the brink of collapse. Their father left the family long ago to start a new one, and their devastated mother cut him out of all the family photographs. Roberto wins the family’s trust and gets to know the brothers one by one. Claudio, the youngest, teeters on the edge of madness. Little by little, he removes words from his vocabulary, gradually withdrawing into silence. José, the middle of the three brothers, is a petty criminal who sinks ever deeper into the murky waters of crime. The eldest brother is Mario. He is a technology-loving dreamer who is trying to build an airplane on the house’s rooftop using makeshift materials. All the brothers speak fondly of Estela and refuse to accept that she prostitutes herself to bring some money home. Estela’s brothers are surprised that Roberto takes an interest in their miserable lives and even wants to write a novel about them. They look to him as their savior and begin coming up with ideas of their own. Claudio wants Roberto, as a writer, to imagine a different life for the family. Roberto could write new chapters and thereby change the course of their lives. They would only have to follow what happens in the novel. José wants Roberto to write scenes that he could then act out. Ideas for robberies. The money they made could give the family a better life. At first, Roberto is indignant at the idea. However, after thinking long and hard about the situation and wondering which side of this story God would be on, he changes his mind. In time, Roberto asks Estela to meet him for reasons other than their work on the novel. Estela wonders whether he has gone crazy. Or has he forgotten who she is? Worried about the love she is beginning to feel for Roberto, Estela meets Jesus in a church—he has come down from the cross—to ask his advice. When José dies in a shootout with the police, Estela furiously accuses Roberto of seeing her family only as characters in his novel. She reproaches him for sitting at his typewriter all day while life passes him by, and tells him she is going to live in northern Argentina. In the days that follow, Roberto tries to carry on with his usual life, but he is deeply conflicted. At one point, amid the crowded subway, he makes a major decision, having realized that his life would be over if he let Estela go. At the very end, we learn who Roberto was speaking to in the middle of a field at the beginning of the film. He was telling this whole story to a baby—his son.