El tren fluvial

 I was a child, that is, one of those monsters adults manufacture with their regrets. 

Jean-Paul Sartre 

A child escapes the adult world to venture into the world of images. It could be the beginning of The 400 Blowstransported into the present, but El tren fluvial, the debut feature by Argentine filmmakers Lorenzo Ferro and Lucas A. Vignale, chooses to lose its bearings within the coming-of-age narrative and venture into territory halfway between cinema and contemporary art. Less a story to follow than a universe to move through, where landscapes, faces and spaces sometimes seem to free themselves from the rather prosaic necessity of having to tell a story. 

Ferro, already the star of Luis Ortega’s The Angel of Crime (El ángel), and Vignale, whose background also includes music videos, share a vision in which visual composition often takes precedence over narrative progression. The result is a film that seems conceived to be viewed, in part, as an installation: shots arrange themselves into tableaux, faces acquire an almost sculptural quality, and settings take on an uncanny beauty. Cinema thus ceases to be merely a storytelling machine and becomes a space in which to linger, observe and be surprised. 

Milo is the moving centre of this aesthetic apparatus. His father trains him in malambo, a discipline of the body and repetition, as though childhood itself had to submit to a programme of perfection. The boy, however, longs for a city he does not know, but which cinema has already taught him to imagine. He sets out in search of a real place through an imaginary geography: it is not yet clear whether he wants to reach Buenos Aires or simply get away from those who have decided, in advance, what he should become. Adults, after all, often entertain this curious presumption: that their children’s identities are finished works, preferably conforming to the original design. 

The parallel with The 400 Blows thus proves more substantial than merely referential. Like Antoine Doinel, Milo seeks an escape from a universe that insists on educating, correcting and defining him. But while Truffaut used movement and flight to construct a precise existential trajectory, Ferro and Vignale seem chiefly interested in what happens to perception when the child leaves familiar territory behind. The world becomes discontinuous, unpredictable, at times almost theatrical. The passage from imagination to experience does not erase the dream: it puts it to the test. 

This is where El tren fluvial finds its most compelling identity, in the fusion of cinematic sensibility and visual experimentation. The images do not merely illustrate the story; they seem to assert their own autonomy, as though every face and every landscape could exist beyond the film itself. This approach produces moments of considerable evocative power, while occasionally risking leaving the narrative suspended, entrusting the beauty of the compositions with the task of holding together what the storytelling does not always manage to unite. 

But perhaps this is precisely the wager made by the two filmmakers: not to explain the world to the child, nor the child to the viewer. Instead, they allow both to move through a space that still lacks instructions for use. For Milo’s journey does not simply lead from one place to another: it opens up a distance between what we have been taught to be and what we might yet become. And if cinema can resemble an installation, it is also because sometimes there is no need to know exactly where one is going. It is enough that someone has finally stopped telling us how we should walk. 

Imagination is not an empirical or added faculty of consciousness: it is the whole of consciousness insofar as it realises its freedom. 

Jean-Paul Sartre