Shakti (2019)

“Fede” (Ignacio Solmonese) is distraught when his grandmother dies, but he sees it as a moment to reinvigorate his life by dumping his grifriend. He doesn’t want to break her heart, but is pretty swiftly disavowed of that concern by a telephone call that suggests that traumatised she isn’t. Meantime, he has his therapist; a style of getting his car out of a tight parking spot that he might have learned from Kathy Bates and his dad and brother duly arrive at his tip of an apartment to help him get on with his life. After some singing in a choir with his sagely younger sibling “Ulises” (Patricio Penna) and some corrective surgery on his vision that merely results in him trading his glasses for one’s without a prescription, “Fede” meets “Shakti” (Laura Visconti), they share a joint and perhaps are about to embark on a new stage of their lives that will doubtless require some compromise between their lifestyles and their faiths. This is pretty much an antithesis of the standard cinematic approach to grief. There’s no wailing and breast-beating, just a lad who wants to get on with things - and this demonstrated by an entertainingly written short observation on how he sets about it. It isn’t laugh out loud, but the scenarios have a dark humour to them that helps to keep this moving along quirkily for twenty minutes. No, it’s not the kind of feature you’ll remember, but it’s worth a gander.