Window Boy Would Also Like to Have a Submarine (Alex Piperno, 2020) (Patreon)

THIS REVIEW CONTAINS MAJOR SPOILERS.

Destined to go down in the Wacky Title Hall of Fame, alongside Teenage Hooker Became Killing Machine in Daehakno and On the Marriage Broker Joke as Cited by Sigmund Freud in Wit and Its Relation to the Unconscious, or Can the Avant-Garde Artist Be Wholed?, the debut feature by Uruguayan director Alex Piperno is highly inventive. Bearing a certain surface similarity to Eduardo Williams' peripatetic head-scratcher The Human Surge, this film ends up in a very different place than it starts. Really, the closest comparison I can actually make to anything on the current scene would be the slippery, dreamlike cinema of Alain Guiraudie.

At first. everything seems fairly normal. Some workers in Southeast Asia are going about their business clearing a field, when they notice a boarded-up wooden shed that has not been there before. They attribute malevolent intent to the structure, believing it to have arrived through some sort of supernatural chicanery. In this regard, they treat the nondescript shed much like the various humanoids regard the monolith in 2001. (John Smith's The Dark Tower is another notable point of comparison.) One man in particular (Noli Tobol) seems reluctant to engage with the mysterious structure.

Without warning, the action shifts to a cruise ship, where we find an employee (Daniel Quiroga) being chewed out by his boss. He is an on-deck janitor who the other workers refer to simply as "Chico," and we see him going from deck to deck, spraying the salty mist off the outer windows with a water hose. So it seems we have met our Window Boy. But he is a bit of a shirker, and he does below deck to seek out a storage closet where he can surreptitiously catch a nap. When entering one such closet, he discovers a secret portal that not only deposits him on land, in downtown Montevideo. It opens onto the bathroom in the apartment of a young woman (Inés Bortagaray).

The remainder of Window Boy entails a cross-cutting between these three locales, with Chico (whose character is also named Daniel) serving as the point of connection for two of them. To say more would be to deprive the viewer of the full experience of Piperno's sleight of hand. But it's worth noting that there is a gimmick at work here that is fully cognizant of its ridiculousness. In one sense, Window Boy observes the sort of spatial logic one finds only in Las Vegas magic shows and Roadrunner cartoons. At the same time, Piperno is clearly taking the piss out of the arthouse trope -- now best exemplified by the films of Alejandro González Iñárritu -- that we are all connected in the end. Faith may be comforting, but it's better by far to have a submarine.

You'll see.