The Queen of Fear

Wednesday 10 October, Cinema 1, 8:45pm

 

Meet Robertina – Rober to her friends, Tina to her adoring public. She is preparing a one-woman show about which she is giving little away. Juggling a hyper-anxious live-in housekeeper and an on/off husband who appears to have moved out, she finds herself edging closer to her opening night without a clear sense of where things might end. Valeria Bertuccelli, one of Argentina’s most accomplished comic performers, brings her impeccable sense of timing to this debut feature, which she wrote and – with Lucrecia Martel’s assistant director Fabiana Tiscornia – co-directed. Moving from slapstick to Beckettian absurdism, this is a quirky film about balancing public and private identities and coping with a mid-life crisis, which asks searching questions about identity and agency.