BYRON BAY INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL: An onscreen aficionado of the spaghetti western – his cat is even named Clint – budding Spanish filmmaker Sergio (Fele Martinez) has a slight problem with his screenplay for a spurs and saddles drama set in Chile’s desolate northern desert: it’s lousy. 'Even the names of the characters are awful," laments his agent, while various producers can barely look at him. Needing inspiration for a rewrite, Sergio takes off for South America, but when he arrives in a suitably isolated and windswept town, people recognise him as someone called Diego. Soon, without too much thought, he decides to accept the acknowledgments, and thus within hours of pretending to be Diego he’s kidnapped and driven into the desert.
The movies have a long history of doing bad things to screenwriters, and being rewritten is the least of them (just ask Barton Fink). In Argentinean writer/director Diego Rougier’s feature, which serves as a tribute to the western genre while using it as an outline for blackly comic existential mystery, Sergio can’t escape his decision to briefly be Diego. The punishment far outweighs the crime, as it turns out that his double previously fled the lawless region, upsetting local crime boss Victor (Sergio Hernandez). Despite Sergio’s protestation, he’s beaten and threatened, then sent to the temporary care of the curmudgeonly Vizcacha (Patricio Contreras).
Everything that happens to Sergio – the laconic threats, the shoot-outs – is what he hoped he could have imagined and got down on paper, but when he tries to briefly write Vizcacha tells him to go and get the goats. There are nods towards real life and the fictional world crossing over to inform each other, but Sal plays out as a sparse thriller that tempts Sergio, through the urgings of Vizcacha, to actually become Diego and thus extricate himself from the situation.
The arid landscape and ramshackle buildings inspire the kind of widescreen compositions that found favour with western directors as diverse as John Ford and Sergio Leone, and David Bravo’s cinematography is particularly evocative. But as much as Rougier recreates the bloodthirsty tenets of the spaghetti western, the homage never threatens to come to life – for long periods the movie can’t quite get you to suspend disbelief and imagine that Sergio is at genuine risk. The torture is bloody window dressing, and instead he’s the guide who lacks comprehension even as he encounters surly men and passionate women who make love to him before going home to their vengeful husbands.
The pleasure here is academic, distant, and when Sergio/Diego is assigned a smuggling job as penance by Victor his failure to get it started inadvertently suggests that screenwriting is not his only problem area. 'Even a child could have done it," claims one of Victor’s lieutenants, and in Sal the fictional gap between hope and execution is warily reflected in the finished film. The stillness drags, and the stand-offs are neither staged nor renounced with the necessary operatic clamour. Rougier must have had more sympathetic producers than Sergio does.
