Wisconsin FIlm Festival: Rosaura at 10 O’Clock

If you smartly book a ticket for Rosaura at 10 O’Clock at this year’s Festival, you are likely to be stunned that this gripping, gothic Argentine masterpiece from 1958 has been so rarely screened before in the U.S. Set in 1950s Buenos Aires, the movie’s story centers on Camilo, a timid, middle-aged painter who lives in a boarding house run by an overbearing and nosey matron and her daughters. Camilo’s monotonous life takes a mysterious turn when he begins receiving perfumed love letters from Rosaura, a woman he claims to have met while painting her portrait at a wealthy client’s home. But when Rosaura unexpectedly appears at the boarding house one night at exactly 10:00 p.m., her enigmatic presence shatters the illusion, revealing a far more complicated and sordid truth. As jealousy, hidden motives, and haunting pasts converge, a murder forces the characters to question every version of reality they’ve been given. Because Rosaura is told through a labyrinth of flashbacks and conflicting testimonies of several unreliable narrators, you in the audience will be forced to question everything too. One of veteran director Mario Soffici’s biggest triumphs is adopting the modernist narrative structure of movies like Citizen Kane and Rashomon, but presenting it in a non-insistent way that sneaks up on you. As the story devolves from a light comic melodrama to a social allegory with all of the tension and sleaze of classic film noir, Soffici’s imagery, rendered in beautiful black and white CinemaScope, becomes increasingly delirious. Like it was for audiences watching last year’s Cannes Classics selections and this year’s To Save and Project series at NY’s Museum of Modern Art, Rosaura at 10 O’Clock is the movie to discover at this year’s Wisconsin Film Festival. Restored in 4K from the original camera negatives by Cubic Restauration in collaboration with the Society for Audiovisual Heritage, coordinated by Fernando Madedo and supervised by Luis Alberto Scalella. (JH)

Presented with support from UW Madison Department of Spanish and Portuguese and UW Madison Latin American, Caribbean and Iberian Studies Program