By way of improvisation, relying heavily on events to naturally develop, Argentine filmmaker Gastón Solnicki presents a meandering ode to the city of Vienna, its customs, cultures, facades, and the near-sacrilege of enacting a smoking ban in cafes city-wide.
In, “A Little Love Package,” two main protagonists become the vehicles through which the minutiae of everyday life in Vienna unfolds. Experimental aural and visual cues present themselves as Angeliki (Angeliki Papoulia) and Carmen (Carmen Chaplin) seek the perfect apartment in a city suspended in time.
Produced by Little Magnet Films, out of Austria, and Solnicki’s Argentine production company, Filmy Wiktora, “A Little Love Package” is the fifth cinematic feature for Solnicki, whose entire catalog was recently acquired by MOMA.
Ahead of its debut in the Berlinale’s Encounters strand, he spoke with Variety about the allure of Vienna, breaking from cinematic tradition, and shooting a film during the pandemic.
All cities have a certain charm. Why was Vienna the city that captured your attention, enough to film this captivating homage?
When I go to Vienna, I’m really visiting the cultural and economic capital of my family a few centuries ago, and I feel this connection. I see the features, I taste the food.
There’s always this displacement, when you’re not looking at things in an everyday way. Coming to Vienna, regardless of how Vienna has kept intact, for me it has all of these time layers that are so attractive, that made my life as a filmmaker so possible. Coming to Vienna, it’s an exposition into this other world that’s familiar in a literal way. My grandfather and my father were born there so it’s really coming back to something very familiar.
You use multiple languages throughout the film, a more realistic depiction of city life, but not often seen on screen. Can you speak to that decision?
To me, this is natural, it’s also a natural part of my life, being born in Argentina and being forced into, and fascinated by, learning languages. Also, the experience of the nomadic life of my family and the diaspora, not only the language, but even the alphabets. To have this narrator, the great Mexican writer Mario Bellatin, was also important because we were coming from Argentina and Greece and Portugal to Vienna, which was once the center of a vast empire now reduced to its core, but there is this Mexican voice, back in time to another empire, and back to us, to our axis of America. Even if I lost complete control of what I wanted to do with this, it was important, the Spanish element of recital.
Did your background in photography inform the cinematography?
In this film I’m putting myself in the hands of Rui Poças, who’s a really spectacular collaborator for this approach, because he’s wise and somehow seems to know the things that don’t work. So, we’re not wasting time, which we really don’t have. Photography is an important influence on me, but at the same time I’m not manipulating that so much. I mean, it’s my equipment and I already have specific lenses I want to work with, but it’s not me doing the cinematography, I’m not involved in that regard. Before, I gave him a few choices, and then I let go. Like being a good dad. You always have to be a good dad to your cinematographer.
The film’s ambient sound played a large role in pulling the viewer into the scene. How important is sound in a production like this?
We don’t have a script, but we do find other ways of creating tension and structure. Sound is at the center of this search. I grew interested in going against a certain tradition of centering sound and focusing only on this idea of intelligibility and understanding.
It’s a more musical approach to understanding the soundscapes we’re dealing with, the locations. Even when we’re doing the editing, I’m not interested in generic library sounds. There’s something to do with musicality. Most of what you’re listening to is the sound that was there. It’s really immersive and it has an emotional aspect which can be very abstract and ethereal, but also very physical and concrete. Vienna is a very strange city in that regard. Unlike Buenos Aires, it’s extremely silent. It was also during lockdown, so it was almost surreal, artificially silent. It’s very interesting, as an archive of Vienna.
What was your experience shooting in the midst of a pandemic?
The very act of making the film in November 2020 was, of course, an act of resistance. I knew I didn’t want to reflect on the pandemic as a contemporary phenomenon in a journalistic way, in fact, my quest goes exactly in the opposite direction. I’m looking for these more timeless, narrative pieces that I then put together. So, the masks and the specifics of the pandemic was everything that I did not want. Nevertheless, we were completely surrounded by these. All of the cafes were closed and there was no place to warm up, to go to the toilet, or charge the batteries. The logistics were really upside down. I think this also somehow strengthened our bonds. It was really quite a strong bonding process for all of us.
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