Pin de Fartie review – spoonerist remix of Samuel Beckett’s Endgame finds fresh absurdity in Argentina

Remember remixes? Where you take a song and swap out parts of it with new or pre-existing material, changing it just enough to be still recognisable? Argentinean director Alejo Moguillansky applies this quintessentially postmodern aesthetic to film with a funky cinematic remix, or even series of remixes, of Samuel Beckett’s one-act play Fin de Partie, AKA Endgame. The result feels a little retro and possibly a bit too pleased with its own cleverness, and the spoonerist title is juvenile. But in the end this really achieves something with both the source material and the remix that’s fresh, pleasingly provocative, and at times moving.

Beckett’s 1957 absurdist masterwork has just four characters on stage throughout, two of whom do most of the talking: cantankerous blind, disabled Hamm banters with his servant/slave Clov, while Hamm’s parents, Nagg and Nell, live in dustbins upstage and talk rather less. There’s an air of apocalyptic doom, much talk of drugs, food and, above all, time running out.

Moguillansky offers a series of select cuts from the play with different cast members (no Nagg or Nell for the most part), changing the balance each time simply through casting, performance choice and context. In the first interpretation, Hamm becomes blind but mobile Otto (Santiago Gobernori) and Clov becomes Cleo (Cleo Moguillansky, the director’s daughter), who have a tetchy father-daughter dynamic that unfolds in a lakeside house. Meanwhile, in Buenos Aires a pair of actors (Laura Paredes and Marcos Ferrante) meet furtively in a flat; they are not having an affair but rehearsing Fin de Partie together, falling in love with each other in the process.

Elsewhere, an older woman (Margarita Fernández) insists that her son (the director himself) reads her passages from the Spanish translation of Beckett’s play (the same text used throughout), and so on. In addition, Luciana Acuña (the director’s wife, also a performer) and musician Maxi Prietto offer their own omniscient glosses on the play, with Prietto performing folk-inflected ditties about the action that are amusing and quite ridiculous.

Would Beckett have approved? Probably not, as he tended to insist on fidelity to his vision, right down to the set-dressing. But while his work is not yet in the public domain, his estate these days seems to feel considerably easier about adaptations, and this interpretation is so free and fanciful, more of an essay or an exercise, it probably falls under the terms of fair use. To be honest an academic slant about the whole exercise that, while compelling, may feel a little too dry for some – although no one could be anything but charmed by a scene where Gobernori and young Moguillansky skip in sync along a lakeside promenade with a raging sunset behind them.