Simon of the Mountain
aka Simón de la montaña First screened and reviewed in May 2024
Director: Federico Luis Tachella. Cast: Lorenzo Ferro, Pehuén Pedre, Kiara Supini, Laura Nevole, Agustín Toscano. Screenplay: Federico Luis Tachella, Tomas Murphy, and Agustín Toscano.VOR:④Simon's craft makes a solid impression but its risks and originality, even at the edge of dividing its audience, come through harder.
More and more movies seem to start with a pre-title scene plucked from about two-thirds of the way into the story. Sometimes, there's real more-than-met-the-eye impact when we eventually return to this passage in its organic context, with X-ray vision for previously opaque layers. Sometimes it's just the same dish, again: a dinner party where the third course is room-temperature leftovers of the first.
In Simon of the Mountain, the logic behind what we're shown first is obvious: the appetizer is for sure the most impressive concoction. Amid the overpowering howls of a gray, silty wind, two men, each showing signs of cognitive disability, attempt to scale a rocky peak while barely able to hear each other or to keep their eyes open. As they clamber, one asks the other a series of questions (can you cook a meal? do you know how to make a bed?) that suggest a kind of emergency job interview, as if one jailbreak participant is pop-quizzing the other to chart their next best move (can we get by unnoticed as hotel staff somewhere? are you an asset or a liability to me?).
The situation gets more dire in these opening minutes, the morality even murkier: two female peers, possibly also disabled, stuck further down the same mountain, are pleading with all their might for help. The men just move further up and away, but qualms must overtake them: suddenly these four and others are united at the summit, still screaming above the gales. Most are waving cellphones above their heads, desperate for a signal. Both weather and altitude are against them, but one of the original men, scooting up the obelisk that someone (who? why?) built atop this peak (when? where are we?) seems on the verge of connecting. Then, his motor control seemingly imperfect despite the nimble feats we've already seen him achieve, he drops the cell. The dismay is general, and sharply expressed. The sound is overwhelming. The visibility approaches zero. Smash cut to black.
This is a steel-cable grabber of a suspenseful, enveloping start, immersing us in a scenario and withholding vital info with equal potency. I thought instantly of that dead-dog, screeching-rubber preamble to Amores perros, still one of the great critical and commercial triumphs of this same Critics Week section at Cannes, which spotlights 10-12 features by mostly rookie directors at a venue about a dozen seaside blocks away from the swanky Competition theater. Simon, a principally Argentinian production, instantaneously announces in Federico Luis Tachella a scene-setter and sequence-constructor of formidable mettle. Several folks in the first-day audience, myself included, audibly exhaled, already spent, as the title arrived on screen.
I can't say that Simon sustains quite that impression of tremendous control throughout, but let's keep things in perspective. I saw few sequences at Cannes that got viewers sitting up as straight as this one did. You wouldn't assume (or even necessarily want) a movie that persevered at such a full throttle, and in an only slightly shifted register, Simon remains galvanizing and distinctive throughout. Still, Luis Tachella sometimes struggles a bit with his structure and scenography. Simon, the phone-dropping focal character of the opening passage, has a working-class mom who's a little fatigued by everything her son regularly throws out at her: insolence, secret-keeping, unreliability, emotional manipulation. He's also got an aspiring stepfather whom he regularly affronts, sometimes violently, and with whom Mom wishes he'd just get along. We've seen all these dynamics before, and neither the actors nor Luis Tachella chart a clear path away from cliché. These are sufficiently important characters that deficits in their scenes pose problems to the movie as a whole.
And as for that "movie as a whole," it's hard to discuss without disclosing quite a bit that I was thrilled not to know. I'll go further: drunk on the rare possibility of being a fully blank slate to everything I was seeing, I read almost no plot capsules before Cannes started, eschewed all but a few reviews (and those few only of movies I'd already seen), and implored my many critic friends to signal as little as possible about titles I hadn't caught up to yet. I never saw the famous Screen grid. This was a great experiment in self-sequester, right in the middle of cinema's shiniest carnival and maddest courthouse. And Simon of the Mountain is near the top of the list of films that I suspect I'd have liked less if I knew the major hook of the story, which is strange and halting in itself and also a nervy, possibly reckless invitation to Discourse.
Here's what I'll say: much of Simon of the Mountain transpires inside the disability-focused residential facility where most of its characters live and from which, as the first sequence makes clear, they occasionally stage departures. I imagine the overall narrative, as devised and conducted by a non-disabled director, will entice some of the same mix of excitement, uncertainty, and outright condemnation that ten years ago greeted The Tribe (2014), another Critics' Week champion at Cannes, and an uncaptioned, literally and figuratively hard-hitting drama about the teenaged residents of a Ukrainian school for the deaf, made by the hearing writer-director Myroslav Slaboshpitskyi.
Simon, like that film, both is and isn't squarely about disability and has equally compelling interests, as The Tribe did, in dynamics of membership, hierarchy, outsiderness, power, and institutionality. Disability is neither a neutral or arbitrary context for exploring these questions nor, I'd wager, the fundamental heart of the film. But people will disagree mightily about how Luis Tachella navigates these rocky representational rapids—not least because Simon, as it currently exists, sometimes comes across as an imposingly concerted piece of work and at other times leaves mixed signals or loose ends where a little more clarity or structure might belong.
Simon himself is a chaos agent if ever there was one: no great fan of clarity but with weirdly equal compulsions toward structure and anti-structure. In other words, there are character-based reasons why the movie irself is as narratively and thematically mercurial as he is. Beyond that, and here's the issue I'm most dancing around, Simon's got a project, and nobody in the movie, blood-related or not, disabled or not, understands it (if they even know about it). Simon acts out of desires and impulses he may not understand himself, so if viewers spend a lot of this provocative, strongly propulsive, but slippery movie wondering exactly what's going on and why, we've got a lot of company within the plot. You might even say it's a movie where everyone, including us, is trying hard to hoist an antenna and get a good signal, even after it's over.
Lorenzo Ferro has a lot to manage in the central role, constantly on view and at some level constantly inscrutable, tasked to convey a guy who is possibly id-driven and just as possibly an ego in overdrive (or both). Luis Tachella asks a lot of him and places his lead as well as his audience in some uncomfortable situations, though it's a relief in some ways to see an actor/director pair go out on so many limbs. Ferro's also not the only actor allowed to shine, in part because, unlike many movies that feature this many disabled or visibly different characters, Simon of the Mountain commits throughout to the temperamental and motivational specificity of each person on screen. Especially vivid and powerfully etched is Kiara Supini as Colo, Simon's maybe-girlfriend in the facility, who may have had romantic and sexual designs on him for a while or may just have singled him out as the cohort member easiest to entice. Colo, who has Down's Syndrome, also has a key scene where she either suffers an accident that forces Simon to rescue her or lays a trap to learn something about Simon she's keen to establish (or both). In the moment but especially in the aftermath, this wonderful actress is a superior poker player but also an anchor for our emotional identification and investment.
I can't imagine what it feels like right now in Argentina to try to nurture, much less finish, an ambitious piece of work in an expensive, forever fragile medium like the movies, especially given some unique logistical challenges in Simon, which is hard to envision as catnip to major investors. I'm genuinely sympathetic, and yet Simon's third act struck me as its weakest: most prone to conventional payoffs and character vectors and not quite adequate to the levels of dense intrigue and possibility it has assembled to that point.
But this movie keeps springing surprises, and the final scene is a total doozy, in a quieter, utterly different way from the opener. Here, Simon faces an uncomfortable, high-stakes interview for which he only has himself to blame—and which he may even have been courting all along, though he rarely seems like a sterling-silver strategizer. Who knows what he'd prepared to say or expected to act, but when his interrogator materializes and is notably gorgeous, this young, hormone-forward adult has some quick decisions to make. Is he going to lie? Is he going to tell the truth? Is he going to flirt with her, or would that be a mistake? Is he aiming to spark compassion or curiosity or confusion, and what's the surest route to eliciting any of them? Has Simon ever had a long game? And what about his other audiences in this moment?
Every single choice that Ferro as performer and Luis Tachella as storyteller make in this passage is heavily freighted—and in this case, I think, the fracas of competing implications is entirely a strength. I'd expected from the first minutes of Simon of the Mountain to want to revisit it someday to re-experience the beginning, but what I'm now most preoccupied by and eager to revisit is the end, not just as a gripping standalone passage but as informed by everything that precedes it. Whatever my varying mileage with the uneven middle—and I must say Simon kept growing in my estimation as the two weeks passed—I'm delighted for a movie that starts and concludes with this much power and leaves so much to debate. Grade:B
