Since the early 2000s, the fiercely independent Argentine filmmaking collective El Pampero Cine has built a sui generis filmography by shirking conventions. A catalogue that includes Mariano Llinás’ 13.5-hour La Flor and Laura Citarella’s 4.5-hour Trenque Lauquen doesn’t exactly make it easy. Yet those who groove with Pampero’s beat will attest to the singularly rewarding experience of giving oneself over to their films. Pin de Fartie, the latest from co-founder Alejo Moguillansky, clocks in at a very reasonable 106 minutes. How it expands on and deconstructs one of the 20th century’s defining absurdist plays will send one’s head spinning nonetheless.
Said play is Samuel Beckett’s Fin de Partie (Endgame as it’s known in English) from 1956. The highly experimental, one-act tragicomedy is set in a single room featuring four characters who banter while contending with the bleakness and meaninglessness of existence. Pin de Fartie opens on a scene to immediately remind one of the play’s setting––a blind man bosses his servant / caretaker around while exchanging a series of mundane, repetitive questions and answers––except here the recipient of the blind man’s (Otto) petty rage is a girl (Cleo). You realize this isn’t just an updated reenactment of the source material when the camera cuts to a team of people providing narration and sound effects. Things get more complicated when the same team starts narrating “variants” of Beckett’s story: one in which two actors meet weekly to rehearse Fin de Partie, and another where a blind woman asks her son to read her the play. In addition to the meta quality of the whole construction, the fates of characters begin diverging from their literary counterparts in unexpected ways.
This being El Pampero Cine, it comes as no surprise that the film is pretty esoteric in conception and execution. Viewers unfamiliar with Fin de Partie or Beckett’s philosophical leanings would have a harder time finding their way into it; the obsessively wordy script (featuring entire passages lifted verbatim from the original play) doesn’t make it more accessible, either. Yet there’s a genuine playfulness and inventiveness to how Moguillansky and co-writers Luciana Acuña and Mariano Llinás treat a 70-year-old text about existential despair. The inherent silliness of Otto and Cleo’s situation is underscored to bring out the comedy in Beckett’s words. While you still sense the frustration of the characters who feel trapped and unable to change anything around them, the sheer banality of their quick-fire back-and-forth (“What time is it?” “The usual.”) exposes the artificiality of the world they inhabit and injects sharp comedic relief.
The segment about rehearsals has an altogether different vibe. In becoming the characters created by Beckett, the two actors begin to doubt whether the feelings they have for each other are their own or all pre-written. As time progresses, their weekly meetings turn into an examination of performance and authenticity that hits a surprisingly emotional note.
Then there’s the perhaps trippiest section: the blind woman and her son, in which the dutiful progency begins noticing parallels between the story he reads and his own life. To find out what this means (and whether his mother is trying to tell him something through Beckett) he goes on a private investigation regarding his very being. Here, at the latest, the wild originality that has been the trademark of Pampero productions really shines through. From the man’s discovery of a tennis player who looks just like him to decoding the phrase tattooed on his doppelganger’s arm, the story takes such a strange turn as to suggest a whole different movie. This readiness to abandon logic and traditional narrative arcs––to allow the little mysteries of life into storytelling––is what gives films like Pin de Fartie that extra spark and lets the viewer feel that high of witnessing something take flight.
The film flows from one segment to the next and back with great fluidity, tied by glimpses into the recording studio where an omniscient narrator exerts a God-like oversight towards unknowing subjects. This narrative device smartly conveys the totalitarian rule of storytellers and adds further layers to Beckett’s reflection on man’s powerlessness to effect change. Yet Moguillansky proves far less of a fatalistic nihilist. The final stretch finds each character coming to some realization, breaking from a cycle of dependency and hopelessness. Fin de Partie is very much about our inability to choose our own endings. By consigning its characters to a world envisioned by Beckett but giving them the agency to go off-script, Pin de Fartie becomes an uplifting, quietly profound rebuttal of a text it deftly reimagines for the screen.
Pin de Fartie premiered at the 2025 Venice Film Festival.
The post Venice Review: Pin de Fartie Is a Playful, Head-Spinning Take on Samuel Beckett first appeared on The Film Stage.
