From above, a slow, circular panoramic shot floats above a grey and gloomy Buenos Aires. To the sound of Jorge López Ruiz’s tepid jazz, we see facades of buildings, television antennae and smoke from factories in the distance. Finally, the aerial movement curves downwards to land on a roof terrace, attracted by a disturbing aquatic presence: a swimming pool on top of a building. The opening shot of La terraza (Leopoldo Torre Nilsson, 1963) is emphatic: amid the urban clang and the pressing grey city, standing water contained at altitude becomes a magnet that ineluctably attracts the eye.

At the edge of and inside this swimming pool, author Beatriz Guido and director Leopoldo Torre Nilsson will build a drama about self-confinement. The film stands among the greatest fruits of this creative partnership, emblematic within Latin American cinema, which had its peak between the end of the 1950s and the beginning of the following decade. Yet, while the dense air of grand old houses and imposing ruined walls hung heavy over La casa del ángel (1957), La caída (1959), La mano en la trampa (1961), Piel de verano (1961) and Homenaje a la hora de la siesta (1962), here the enclosure takes effect in the open air, surrounding by teeming urbanity. Echoes of Torre Nilsson and Guido’s previous films are indeed present in this tale of independent children and a decadent bourgeoisie, but the air being breathed here is poisonous in a different way.

A low angle shot plunges us into the lift shaft of a modern building. The angle is reminiscent of the rope-hoist elevator in La mano en la trampa, into which Laura sneaks in order to spy on her aunt, who is hidden away from view in a bedroom on the second floor of the mansion. But this time the lift mechanism is automatic and it carries us to the many floors of an apartment building, as the little girl Belita delivers the morning papers to her neighbours. The granddaughter of the doorman, she is a lively, clever girl who spends her day doing little jobs — and suffering great humiliations — in order to earn money, all the while making scathing comments about the families behind each door. “You’re the one who’s robbed the country. We’ll see your name in the obituaries”, she says about one Aguirre, acting as spokesperson for the viewer’s reaction to the class of people occupying the building. Arriving at the terrace, the girl washes her face using the cool, forbidden waters of the swimming pool and dries herself with someone else’s towel, dancing and briefly profaning this space that doesn’t belong to her, but which she knows better than anyone. She also recites fragments of satirical ditties, which operate like Brechtian songs throughout the film, exposing the world we are shown to the ferocious critique of their lyrics: right from the start, one song sung by the girl tells us that “Life is expensive/that’s what people say/there are many who suffer/and others who barely notice”.

The social gulf announced by this song, between those who feel the weight of the country in their blood, and the others who drift through Argentina seemingly impervious to any gravity, will make itself felt through the composition of the drama. Belita and her friend Gaspar, who works in a nearby theatre, are children who have been pushed into premature adulthood, like those in El secuestrador (1958) and La caída, who do odd jobs to make a living in a country in crisis, far from any adult supervision. Belita and Gaspar wake up before anyone else, have a crystal-clear understanding of the crisis (“now there’s even queues / for bread, butter, kerosene”, says another of her songs) and save up money to buy a kiosco, yet are always ready with a cheeky smile that can appear at any moment. At the other extreme, Claudia and Alberto, residents of the building who were born into money, have a deep, melancholic look in their eyes, with only a reticent silence to express their poorly defined frustrations, their omnipresent boredom and their alienation from the country’s problems.

While the younger children immerse themselves in the throngs of people queueing at the nearby market, or disappear down the narrow corridors of the building as they serve those who have no need to move if they do not feel like it, the scions of the porteño elite have the whole sun-kissed city at their disposal. Alberto, a law student, travels to the university accompanied by his friend Luis, to meet his peers. The camera leaves the building and takes to the streets to portray the morning perambulations of these bourgeois youths. Bored of their academic duties, they go out joyriding in diabolical cars that block all the lanes on the avenues; they arrive at a karting arena and forcibly take a car from a young boy, only to abandon it when they no longer need it; armed, they go to a Jewish barbeque and urinate on the meat, in a grotesque demonstration of their rigid antisemitism. Torre Nilsson treats this divided sensory world with his plunging mise-en-scène: Alberto and his friends take the city for themselves, as if it was their birthright, and the spacious, wide-open shots communicate the magnitude of their impunity; the little girl Belita serves coffee at a funeral on the third floor, and the camera squeezes between the faceless dresses and black suits, always staying at her eye level.

This microcosm of the porteño bourgeoisie, which Belita craftily navigates as she comments on the lives of the wealthy, will later become the stage for a potent theatre of the absurd, highly characteristic of Guido and Torre Nilsson. But on these initial escapades through the city, the director (at that time nearing his 40s, but already with a decade and a half of solid industry experience under his belt, an award from Cannes and an uncontested claim to being the most internationally respected Argentinian director) and his camera evoke those of other, younger filmmakers who, at that moment in history, were freshly engaging in a renewed exploration of Buenos Aires’s textures, in films like El amigo (Leonardo Favio, 1960), Alias gardelito (Lautaro Murúa, 1961) and Tres veces ana (David José Kohon, 1961). Several members of what was known as the ‘Generacíon del 60’ had appeared regularly as actors in Torre Nilsson’s films (Murúa, Favio), and others were self-confessed admirers of his imposing style and creative independence.

It is no coincidence that the name of a young Ricardo Becher, who had his directorial debut that same year with Racconto (1963), appears as one of the four screenwriters for La terraza. Nor that Mabel Itzcovich, a forceful film critic who argued for the renewal of Argentinian cinema in magazines like Cinecrítica and Tiempo de Cine, and who later became a key filmmaker (albeit overlooked) of her generation, supervised the script. La terraza is for Torre Nilsson what Vidas secas (1963) would be, in the same year, for Nelson Pereira dos Santos. While the Argentinian director’s artistic integrity had been a guiding light for the Generation of 1960, just as the Brazilian had been held up as a model for the nascent Cinema Novo, La terraza and Vidas secas represent a settling of accounts with the youth. Despite being directed by veterans, they are films that, on first viewing, do not take issue with newer works of the era, seemingly taken by the same preoccupations as the younger filmmakers. Vidas secas is part of what is known as the trilogy of the ‘sertão’ (Brazil’s northeastern drylands), alongside Deus e o diabo na terra do sol (Glauber Rocha, 1964) and Os fuzis (Ruy Guerra, 1964), while La terraza operates on the same youthful, urban frequency as Los jóvens viejos (Rodolfo Kuhn, 1962) and Prisioneros de una noche (David José Kohon, 1962).

The opening sequence of Kuhn’s film, released a year earlier, was a manifesto for the generation. In a sequential shot, two friends walk through the street after a night out, when one of them says he wishes he had a lot of money to film “a story about young people, like us”. To which the other responds: “how boring”. As Gonzalo Aguilar wrote, “in this urban-centred cinema, it was necessary to find a language that adopted the youth’s point of view, and its disenchanted gaze on the city”[1]. Self-referential and ironic, these young filmmakers, contemporary to La terraza, scrutinised the values of a young generation they belonged to. But none of them would be as merciless as the elder Torre Nilsson. His bourgeois youths aren’t merely incapable of seeing beyond their own class. They are insensitive, embittered, violent. When the soundtrack imposes itself aggressively over the images, it is to silence the voice of a young boy and draw out the imbecilic machismo of the scene. Even Leonardo Favio, who previously embodied an escape valve from bourgeois introversion in La mano en la trampa, here plays the most perverse of the perverse. In Dar la cara (1962), an emblematic film of the Generación del 60, the other veteran José Martínez Suárez ensured that the attack on one of the film’s protagonists, a leftist student, remained out of shot. But here the perpetrators of rampant violence are themselves the protagonists: Torre Nilsson shows their attacks in broad daylight, their antisemitism occupying the entire frame.

On one weekday like any other, Alberto invites his lawless Law Faculty classmates to abandon their tasks and spend the day on the roof terrace, drinking, dallying and playing games. To begin with, the swimming pool is an oasis of pleasure and refreshment, just like the one that Graciela Borges, who here brings to life the intriguing Claudia, swam across in the grounds of the mansion in Piel de Verano. But then Guido’s script starts to get to work on the focussed drama that characterises her writing for cinema, which is, at the same time, a mosaic of dense individualities who gradually reveal themselves in an acidic and aggressive depiction of class. The pool is filled with idle bourgeois youths, who take it over and transform the space into a battleground against the monotony of their lives, in generational rebellion against the conservatism of their families. In this humid territory soaring over the city, submerged truths rise to the surface, bodies attract and repulse beneath the water, and all that is most rotten in this youth is revealed, along with the traces of interiority of each of them. The tone oscillates between a genuine interest in the dramas of each character, communicated in a passion for faces shown in the earliest shots, which have always characterised Torre Nilsson’s style, and a generalised, terrifying coolness, where cynicism perfuses all relationships.

While Guido and Torre Nilsson’s style has on occasion been described as ‘creole gothic’ — for its darkened rooms, mysterious mansions and secret subterfuges — La terraza is a film set fully in the light of day. The small crowd of rooftop bodies amass in the pool, as the sun bounces off the tiles. Here there are none of the bewitching chiaroscuros of the trilogy formed by La casa del ángel, La caída and La mano en la trampa. Here there are no gardens shaded by trees, nor thick walls to isolate the characters in their seclusion. The terrace lacks any shelter from storms, and the veranda offers scarce protection from a city that reaches in on all sides. Clouds occasionally darken everything, but what predominates is the uniform, aggressively white light. The bodies merge and become indistinguishable.

Every now and then a twist of Ignacio Souto’s camera confronts us directly with the sun, in an unintentional echo of Luiz Carlos Barreto’s hard, unfiltered cinematography in Vidas secas. But where in Nelson Pereira dos Santos’s film the inclement sun rakes the eyes of the viewer and accentuates the drought-riven lives of the impoverished workers, here the violently explosive whiteness places us at another extreme: the open hostility among the bourgeois youth lining all corners of the swimming pool. Their language is shot through with ferocity: “bring me that tin opener or I’ll strangle you”, shouts Alberto at the little girl Belita. “What are you doing?”, one asks. “Hating each other”, another replies.

There is no escape. Lining up on the edge of the pool, the girls and boys improvise a game called “the raft”. One person walks down the line disposing, one by one, of everyone they do not wish to take with them on the “raft of the desperate shipwrecked”, until only one remains, the chosen one of that turn, who will gain “full rights” to the chooser. In a monstrous version of truth or dare, before each elimination, face to face, every justification for dismissal carries the weight of a perverse revelation, which serves to destroy the opponent and anticipates their fall into the pool. Torre Nilsson and Guido convert their theatre of the absurd into a theatre of cruelty.

If there is any charm among these bourgeois youths, any integrity despite their suffocating alienation, Torre Nilsson and Guido reserve it for the silent gestures of the outcasts, those who, within the group, have the courage to embrace some vestige of inadequacy. It is in the moment Vicky, who the boys all view as an easy target, decides to jump into the pool herself rather than take someone with her on the raft of the desperate. And it is in the gaze of Pablo, the boy who likes boys yet cannot admit it out loud, who nonetheless gazes intensely at those he desires with a timidity full of dignity.

When the youths’ noisy spree begins to worry their parents, Vicky threatens to throw herself off the rooftop if their games are interrupted. They lock the door, with Belita the only person allowed to enter every now and then to supply sustenance for their shenanigans. The family members meet inside the building to find a solution to this unusual rebellion. “They have everything they want yet they stay out there playing havoc”, says one old man. “We have to stop this before they take to the streets”, pronounces another. But a parallel community has dug in around the swimming pool and, faced with successive attempts to put an end to the party, the group begins to organise itself. The suicide threat turns into a method, and they now take turns on the veranda in shifts: whoever is on guard at the moment of dissolution must throw themselves off. The tedium of their empty lives is such, that death becomes a means of safeguarding their stronghold of leisure and privilege.

The pool’s magnetic field is too strong: this afternoon will turn into night, morning, and afternoon again, and for the rest of the film the group resists their relatives’ attempts to remove them from their aquatic bastille. At one point even a priest on a helicopter is brought in to intervene — one absurdity must be met with another — yet no one wishes to give in. “Don’t play the Bolsheviks’ game”, Father Alfonso tells them. But the existential abyss that awaits them when they leave the terrace is too deep, so they must commit fully to their exuberant lunacy.

“For the first time in my life, I feel like I am doing something important to me”, says Alberto. But it is impossible for us to join this insurgency, since our emissaries, Gaspar and Belita, are always there to expose this rebellion of bourgeois-against-bourgeois to ridicule. Gaspar, who falls asleep on the roof, watches them from above, and the high angle shot of the pool allies us with his inquiring eye. When the group discovers him, they take off his clothes and make him sing a song wearing a woman’s theatrical dress, and his humiliation reminds us which side we are on.

To less attentive eyes, the claustrophobic tale of La terraza will instantly recall O anjo exterminador (1962) by Luis Buñuel. But the fact is that enclosure was already a recurring theme for Torre Nilsson and Guido, at least since La casa del ángel, and Buñuel’s brand of cruelty had developed in parallel with the Argentinian artists. We must not forget that El secuestrador, starring the same Leonardo Favio, was just as cruel as Los olvidados (Luis Buñuel, 1950). Torre Nilsson’s ruthless camera might only be comparable to the Mexican Buñuel, and in both there is an insistent rejection of sentimental humanism as a means of catharsis.

Bit by bit, the swimming pool fills up with leftover food, bottles, cigarettes, blood from the fisticuffs. The water, now murky, is a filthy repository for the detritus of this dammed-up existence. The darkened pool resembles the one that, forty years later, would host the same Graciela Borges, the ultimate star of swimming pool iconography in Argentinian cinema, in La ciénaga (Lucrecia Martel, 2001). Indeed, Martel would convert the swimming pool into a prime metaphor and paradigmatic leitmotif within her theory of cinematography [2]. By comparing the cinema auditorium to a swimming pool, she highlights the immersive character of the film experience, with a strong focus on the sonic element that surrounds us on all sides, like the enclosed water. But the parallels go further. The Martelian bourgeoisie, just as decadent, would continue Beatriz Guido and Leopoldo Torre Nilsson’s obsessions, and it is no coincidence that La ciénaga would feature Borges and La mujer sin cabeza (2007) would feature María Vaner, both actors favoured by the duo.

When, at the end of La terraza, Favio’s character grabs Belita and throws the girl from the top of the building, bourgeois cruelty reaches its peak. The gesture is the explosive culmination of this rotten rebellion, which turns the discardable bodies of the poor into a weapon for tilting at the windmills of family tradition. Belita survives the fall, since a finale as abrupt as this would, in some way, be too definitive a solution for a drama that, in truth, has never ended. In the final sequence, she and Gaspar will return to the rooftop terrace. The pool is now empty, wintery, full of fallen leaves. They play, reproducing the earlier gestures that first profaned this space. But the city remains, with its buildings and television aerials, stone on stone, brick on brick. “The murgas [carnivals] of today are the same as yesterday’s”, repeats the song that opened the film. Next summer, who knows, the spree may start up again.

[1] Aguilar, Gonzalo. 2003. “La generación del 60. La gran transformación del modelo”. In: Claudio España (director), Cine argentino. Modernidad y vanguardias II. 1957-1983, Buenos Aires: Fondo Nacional de las Artes, pp. 83-93.

[2] Barrenha, Natalia Christofoletti. 2013. A experiência do cinema de Lucrecia Martel: resíduos do tempo e sons à beira da piscina. São Paulo: Alameda Editorial.