House taken over: the fear in El hombre de al lado

Abstract

Hugo Hortiguera (2014) notes that the deterioration or laxity of social ties is perhaps one of the most significant and insistent elements projected in the Argentinean cinematographic discourse of the last decade. In addition to an “escape from the city”, the author notes a retirement in the house, which appears in the movies as the last refuge for protection and escape. But conflicts also reach this intimate zone: a division seems to have possessed the most hidden spaces. The man next door (Duprat and Cohn, 2009) treats the house as a fractured intimate space – it reveals a fabric of distrust that reaches it, changing it from the place that provides protection to its inhabitants to one more unstable space in the city. The film uncovers and explores finds and unfolds a problem of communication and negotiation in the difference that causes a radical change in the way of living in the house Curutchet (project of Le Corbusier). We analyse the way the film conceives of this space in disintegration through the correspondence and dissonances between the house and its inhabitants, thinking about how they are suspended in the diegesis values that guided the construction of Curutchet and how the constant re-signifying of these values promote the emergence of what Freud conceptualized as unhomely. In addition, the method of locating the characters, coupled with the suspicion that governs the relation that the protagonist establishes with the “neighbour”, leads us to connections with classics of Argentine literature that implanted fundamental concepts of the country and its divisions, as in“House taken over” by Julio Cortázar and “Cabecita negra” by Germán Rozenmacher, in the film.