Say ‘Cheese!’

Whisky 2004 Uruguay (94 minutes) directed by Pablo Stoll and Juan Pablo Rebella, who co-wrote the story with Gonzalo Delgado.

Whisky is surprisingly good as a sweetly offbeat, ironic, well-made character study of three faces of melancholy that rises nicely with good acting and a leaven of deadpan humor.

Two long-estranged brothers reunite in the town where they grew up. The brother who is a lifelong bachelor has a woman from work stand in as his wife. The unforeseen consequences this occasions offer each character opportunities for a second chance.

Jacobo Köller (Andrés Pazo­­) is a dour, stingy, distracted more than unfriendly, middle-aged bachelor faithfully married to the family sock business he inherited and operates in Montevideo, Uruguay. Marta Acuña (Mirella Pascual) is his ‘work wife,’ an unmarried middle-aged woman who dutifully oversees his shop and two employees. Herman Köller (Jorge Bolan), Jacobo’s younger brother, left Montevideo as a young man for Brazil, where he opened his own successful sock business, married and had two daughters; Herman is easier-going than Jacobo, slightly vain though self-effacing, and as much absorbed in his business as his brother.

Herman returns to Montevideo for the first time in 20 years for their mother’s matzevah, the Jewish tombstone-dedicating ceremony, in response to an impersonal nine-word summons that Jacobo faxed to him.

Jacobo lives in the apartment where he and Herman grew up, which looks like a once well-appointed place that has gone slowly to seed in the years since his mother became too ill to see to its maintenance. The brothers are lifelong competitors. It seems most likely due to this—Herman is married and Jacobo is not—that Jacobo asks Marta to pose as his wife for the duration of Herman’s visit.

Jacobo has no romantic or sexual interest in Marta. She is a faithful employee he trusts, and it does not seem to occur to him that her standing in as his wife could entail more than renting a tuxedo for a wedding. It is as simple as taking his parents’ gold wedding bands from a manila envelope, giving Marta his mother’s ring, which is too big for her, and putting on his father’s ring.

Nor does Marta seem to have any romantic ideas about her employer. She dutifully agrees, declining Jacobo’s offer to pay her extra for her services. She helpfully suggests that they have a ‘wedding picture’ taken to display in the apartment she never has seen to support this pose: ‘Whisky!’ is what the photographer says to get subjects to smile for the camera.

The illusion of what look like genuine smiles in this posed photograph is the engine that sets the story in motion.

Prior to the photo, Marta has her hair done—her first transformative step—which the two other women employees notice right away, but Jacobo not at all; he is more grateful that she is there to push his car so he can roll-start it when it won’t turn over the first evening he takes her to the apartment. We don’t need Marta’s eyes to see that this apartment, filled with the detritus of bachelorhood and a former long-term invalid’s medical devices and accessories, is going to need a miracle to pass muster. 

Jacobo goes to the airport alone to meet his brother, spending the day with him to attend their mother’s tombstone dedication and later to take in a local football game. Meanwhile, Marta whips the place into shape, even pushing together the twin beds in the master bedroom. Despite eyebrows raised behind his brother’s back when he discovers the top-to-bottom makeover of his world, Jacobo realizes that it all had to happen.

Whisky! The place looks like an apartment shared by the well-to-do middle-aged couple smiling in the picture on the living room credenza.

The brothers’ interaction is uncomfortable. Jacobo seems to tolerate Herman’s visit less than he tolerates Marta in his space; Herman is overeager to please because he is guilty for having left Jacobo to care for their ill, elderly parents and the family business. Marta’s attentions and small talk put Herman at ease. He proposes that the three of them spend the rest of his visit together at Pirápolis, an old-fashioned oceanside resort town outside Montevideo where the brothers vacationed with their parents as children.

At a grand old hotel in Pirápolis, Jacobo and his ‘wife’ get a room with a single queen-sized bed—there are no others available, and that’s not a problem is it, sir? Behind the closed door, Jacobo sleeps uncomfortably on a couch too small for him giving Marta the whole bed to herself; but he places a glass of water on her bed table—something he does for himself, and for her when she tells him she likes it too. When the three are together, Marta makes it easier for Herman to assert himself while deferring to his brother; she is in a sense courted by both brothers. She buys herself a bathing suit and goes to the hotel pool where her too-big wedding band slips off, but Herman and a pair of honeymooners help her find it.

One senses Marta’s influence when Jacobo looks over at a lovely young woman in the hotel dining room while Herman and Marta are talking. And Herman seems in turns to be too vain or too charmed to notice the ragged edges that don’t meet up. Alone together, Herman persuades Jacobo to take a brick of money he has brought out of his guilt for not being there for their mother, which the habitually parsimonious Jacobo later uncharacteristically takes to the resort casino… In an odd way, while the three are in Pirápolis together, together they seem as much alone. They have a photo taken together: Whisky!

This sketchy outline is like a clothes hanger, in that says little about the items it supports—much less of the surprising and delightful moments that make this movie worth seeing. It is a pleasure also to watch these three actors work together, challenging and drawing the best from each other, shaping each other’s characters, and finding seams of humor in work they clearly enjoy. They show a lot more than they tell, and their smallest gestures are often the most telling.

Pascual does an exemplary job of giving color and body to a ‘given’, a woman ‘always there’, a dutiful fixture in a small business and another of countless anonymous middle-aged faces on a rush hour train, revealing this character as she resolves from the background toward a surprising and satisfying ending.

Trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FYuPjUQiQLs&feature=related