Window boy would also like to have a submarine | Take you on a cruise for a spiritual search | Spoilers

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‘Window boy would also like to have a submarine’, by the Uruguayan Alex Piperno, tells three simultaneous stories. The Uruguayan girl living a quiet life in a comfy apartment, the Window Boy, a cruise worker constantly escaping from work, and the Filipino peasants facing the randomness of nature and the supernatural of their cosmovision, curious about a shed that came out of nowhere and installed in the daily life of their village.

‘The spirits of the mount may be testing you,’ says one of the Filipino peasants regarding the surge of the shed. Meanwhile, the Window Boy, or ‘Boy’ to dry, works on a cruise attending to a bunch of elderly people who gaze at a hunchback whale while cruising Patagonia.

The cruise is a portal to the apartment of the Uruguayan girl, and Boy goes from one place to another, at the beginning being home alone. He takes showers and turns on the TV. The sporting news is telling that Uruguayan soccer teams defeated Colombian teams at what I assume should be the Sudamericana.

In an interview, Piperno tells the origin of the idea: moving from Montevideo to Buenos Aires in 2006 and traveling on a ship.

‘I discovered going and coming that I had left a life at Montevideo that kept happening and also had a new life in Buenos Aires as a cinema student. People in Montevideo didn’t know what I did in Buenos Aires and vice versa, so I discovered myself living parallel lives joint by the ship’.

Piperno contrasts the existence of that secret world and what happens in ‘Being John Malkovich’. The main characters of the film keep secrecy around the portal. The gringos, instead, sell tickets for the people to access to being John Malkovich, monetizing and desacralizing everything that comes across them.

For directing such a solemn film, Alex is a funny guy. In this interview, talking about ‘The Great Beauty’ by Sorrentino, he couldn’t help himself referring to Jep Gambardella as Jep Guardiola. He speaks about cruises as a mixed experience between Disney World and Guantanamo.

Jep Guardiola

There are plenty of scenes where Boy goes from one place to another, only finding comfort almost when he reaches the apartment again. At one point, the candid Uruguayan girl finds her way and accesses the boat.

After being invaded many times, the Uruguayan girl finally recognizes the presence of Boy at his apartment. Instead of getting scared, she even fraternizes with him. They sit together and talk about life a little, feeling comfortable with each other and the silence between conversations, as lovers do. She sings to him a song that evokes a spiritual search, about crossing mounts and cascades and going south.

Back in Filipinas, peasants start to wonder about the shed insistently. One of the peasants speaks while dreaming: ‘Is the shed safe? The serpent is destroying the village, ate my woman and my daughters’ shoes’. And suddenly, we realize that the shed also connects to the boat.

In the end, what does the boat mean? Is the last end of things, the fourth wall, where everyone converges, where jungles and cities, ships and apartments, West and East are tangled? Maybe that’s it: the boat is the reminder that everything and everyone is, somehow, connected. Piperno confirms, referring to the trips that originated the idea.

“If that ship could join to possible worlds, it also could join N, infinite possible worlds, and that was the seed of the movie”.

I liked this movie, but I don’t know how to rate it from zero to five. But as I know that what isn’t measured isn’t useless, I rate it 3/5. Do I recommend it? It depends. Would you rather understand everything, or do you not care about loose ends? I remember a conversation I used to have with my ex-girlfriend, a person I watched myriad movies alongside. She is more of the first kind of person: someone who loves stories attached to the objective circumstances of the world.

To be clear: she didn’t like my favorite episode from The Sopranos, ‘The Test Dream’, where Tony books the suite from the Plaza Hotel and falls asleep. After that, an eerie yet exciting, long, and vivid oneiric sequence occurs, which includes the meeting with the dead Carmine Lupertazzi, going back to Melfi’s office to encounter Gloria Trillo, who is also dead, and suddenly appearing in his father’s Cadillac.

No more spoilers. In conclusion: if you like oneiric, surreal, and Lynchian stories, like ‘Saint Maud’, ‘Synecdoche, New York’, ‘Being John Malkovich’, ‘The Tree of Life’, ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’, and ‘Mullholand Drive’, for example, this is the proper film for you.

You can read the other reviews here.