Lázaro at Night

Gabino, who now wants to go by the name Lázaro, is an actor who has never acted. With a mixture of cocky determination and somnambulistic apathy, he stalks a director in pursuit of a role in his new film. The director, who is equally apathetic, limits his casting process to a personal meeting at a café and observing actors drink a glass of water – about the role or the film’s content we know nothing. Despite his lack of cv, Lázaro surveys the possibility of being paid for the casting, and is surprised that the director never considered it.

Unknowingly, Lázaro is in an open relationship. His long-time partner, Luisa, has been meeting their common acquaintance Barreiro, although she is not, in her own words, in a relationship with him. The revelation doesn’t seem to bother Lázaro – his full attention is on getting that acting role. In fact, Lázaro is more disturbed that Luisa and Barreiro are also cast for the film. As for Luisa, her passion for the two men seems, surprisingly, passionless.

Gabino/Lázaro, Luisa, Barreiro—they are all recurring characters in Nicolás Pereda’s filmography, for more than a decade now. Their reappearance is not, however, a question of sequels and prequels, but of a assuming a prismatic lens on the characters, if they amount to characters, so bare bones is their depth—in that regards Pereda takes on a more absurdist and existentialist legacy, in the likes of Beckett. What is at play is the characters’ potential: how they might react in given circumstances or how their interpersonal dynamics change depending on Pereda’s intentions. In other words, the point is not the pursuit of a linear or consequential logic, and as such the films are unlike both Hollywood blockbuster IP and durational experiments like François Truffaut’s Antoine Doinel films or Richard Linklater’s Boyhood and Before Sunrise trilogy.

As a director myself, the film reminded me of my own casting processes. I don’t like traditional casting, opting to simply meet people and test their energies in relation to both myself and the role. It is more important for me to see the actors’ interpretation of the script and the characters than their vocal intonations and timings, bodily expression, and so on, than hear them read on the spot—though I have cast actors solely for the depth of their voice. I also have some experience with recurring characters in my plots, and it is a funny thing to like an actor you’ve worked with before and not being able to cast him again, because the damn, appropriate project does not come up. For me, it is quite a beautiful thing to see the actor age and mature, and appreciate how that changes what you as a director and them can do together—in this regard, Hollywood in particular is curiously, and financially, obsessed with the aging process of casts, as in endless revivals and reunions—next year is Buffy, the Vampire Slayer—using it as leverage not for new inventions but for rehashing the old, that is, the once youthful.

With Pereda, however, and although his tone has been similar throughout his career, returning to the same characters and places is an opportunity to try something new—for example, to empathize more or less with Lázaro or to make Luisa increasingly nonchalant.

A great theme in Lázaro de Noche is omission and subterfuge; how the characters omit speaking what they know to each other, although they all know that they know. Julia wants to tell Lázaro about her affair with Barreiro, but doesn’t want Barreiro and Lázaro to tell each other that they both know about the affair. The film director judges these people’s acting by the banal act of drinking a glass of water, but never tells them what the film is all about. The result is a generalized ennui—the result of which is a sort of “fake it till you make it” attitude, most evident in Gabino’s new identity as Lázaro and concerning delusion that he can be an actor without roles.

No wonder, then, that the film opens itself up to an analogy with the story of Aladdin and the lamp. Wishful thinking only takes you so far when deception and indolence are your baseline. Circumstances can make you wish for immediate satisfaction, but immediacy only makes you stay in the loop. Better to break with it, carrying with you the wish for a different future.