This surprise winner of the best foreign film Oscar shows traces of the South American literary tradition. Juan José Campanella's film opens with a disorienting series of false starts. We experience a series of sentimental scenes involving lovers at breakfast, and lovers parting at a Buenos Aires train station—all accompanied by voiceover—and we realize that one Benjamin Esposito, a recent retiree, is none-too-expertly trying to write a novel. The movie wins us over immediately as these vignettes turn into cliché, and the film cuts to the rueful author crumpling up a piece of paper. Esposito (played a bit too comfortably by Ricardo Darn) clearly has been moved to write by some unresolved feelings. It's the uncovering and resolution of those feelings that is the business of the movie. A bit of a potboiler, and wrapped up too tidily, the film becomes a story of lives lived with and without love. Youthful ardor can curdle into hate, while others' long-barren hearts can bloom in late middle age. It's not quite 100 years of solitude, but the film does depict a quarter century of yearning in the time of the junta, and that's quite enough. By David Fellerath