They All Lie

A group of friends come together at a large house just outside Buenos Aires. Helena, the house's owner is the great-great-granddaughter of the liberal politician and author Domingo Sarmiento, and is visibly concerned with his legacy. Politics and history converge as her convoluted family history spills over into her relationship with a painter who appears to have much in common with Sarmiento's political nemesis, the dictator Juan Martín de Rosas. But politics and literary history is not on everybody's mind. Mónica (María Villar) sings; Isabel (Julia Martínez Rubio) paints and - meanwhile - who is sleeping with whom, and do the affairs relate in any way to the friends who are planning the robbery? From the production company responsible for Castro (screening in this year's LFF and also featuring a number of the same actors) comes an elaborate, inventive thriller whose multiple plotlines converge into a dazzling web of conspiracy and deceit. Piñeiro's camera often plunges us deep into the action, at other times we are invited to observe from a distance as the intrigues play out. The result is an audacious, stylish feature in which alliances are not always what they seem, and truth always remains an elusive conceit that remains tantalisingly beyond our grasp.

Maria Delgado