NOEMÍ GOLD
TOPIC ORIGINAL FILM
Reviewed for Shockya.com & BigAppleReviews.net linked from Rotten Tomatoes by: Harvey Karten
Director: Dan Rubenstein
Writer: Dan Rubenstein
Cast: Catalina Berarducci, Martina Juncadella, Amelia Repetto, Alexandra Velascom
Screened at: Critics’ link, NYC, 12/4/20
Opens: November 20, 2020
Dan Rubenstein in his freshman entry as a writer-director tells a rambling coming-of-age story of a woman in her twenties with a Master’s Degree in architecture, who is pregnant and a resident of Buenos Aires in a country that does not allow abortion. In Latin America, in fact, only Uruguay and Guyana permit the procedure, which makes us think immediately that her solution is either to take the abortion pill which can be obtained on the black market or hop a ferry to Uruguay.
The title character, Noemí Gold (Catalina Berarducci in her first role in a full narrative film), is featured in this tale of an intelligent, educated woman whose boyfriend denies impregnating her and though he allegedly has money is unwilling to come up with the $500, half the price needed for a Uruguay procedure. She first asks a local gynecologist for help, is lied to that “there has been an emergency requiring a 45-minute wait,” and is confronted by the police, who let her go because she is still pregnant.
As she goes through her 27th year, seeming to be barely worried about what to do with the pregnancy, distracted as she relates to various people in her life including her laid-back cousin David from L.A. who is funded to make commercials on his smart phone, her grandmother, who comes up with the money, and her extroverted friend Rosa (Martina Juncadella). There is not much of what most American moviegoers consider drama, since Dan Rubenstein is more involved with looking into Noemí’s psyche, her mood, often morose though picking up emotional energy when on a ferry she meets a young man that she once knew, the two of them working out their specialties: she will teach him drawing and he will instruct her in guitar—when they meet again.
This is not summer vacation, but nobody appears to do any work. Why should an architect in her late twenties be unable to come up with $500 that she needs so badly? And what’s she doing hanging out for even an hour with a rich guy who denies that he is the prospective father of her baby? (She should have threatened him with his obligation to pay child support until their joint creation is eighteen, an investment far greater than the $500 she seeks from him.)
While people in their twenties are physically in their prime and should have no worries, some sociologists insist that it’s one of the most worrisome decades in our lives, as they try to fit into professions, worried much of the time about holding on to the jobs and advancing. The are often short of money and often having to go back to living with our parents as many young people find now during the Covid 19 crisis. “Noemí Gold” comes off as a shaggy dog story, a slice of life that does not follow the usual trajectory involving twists and suspense; just a bunch of young folks going about their business, or rather, their leisure. The film is, what can we say, just OK, neither experimental nor completely conventional, and Catalina Berarducci in the major role is believable.
80 minutes. © 2020 by Harvey Karten, Member, New York Film Critics Online
Story – C
Acting – B
Technical – B
Overall – B-