Puan was one of the films that raised the greatest expectations at the last San Sebastián festival. The Argentine couple formed by María Alché and Benjamín Naishtat won the award for best script, and its protagonist, Marcelo Subiotto, won the award for best performance for this dramatic comedy that is an ode to the public university and philosophy, in particular. . Subiotto plays Marcelo Pena, a middle-aged philosophy professor whose professor and mentor dies unexpectedly. He believes that he will inherit his position, but suddenly Rafael Sujarchuk (Leonardo Sbaraglia), a brilliant colleague who works in Germany, appears to apply for the position.
The character of Sbaraglia is popular and attractive, he speaks German, has an actress girlfriend, claims the joy of Spinoza for a better social coexistence and represents modernity in the face of the tradition to which Pena is anchored, who is going through a personal crisis and sees himself forced to give philosophy classes at home to an octogenarian lady to make ends meet, a portrait of the job insecurity to which public education in the country is doomed. He also does neighborhood philosophy: “Philosophy is an attitude of life and has to do with asking questions that challenge and bother,” he tells his students. But, as the widow of his mentor tells him, he is tied to the faculty and needs to find his own voice.
Puan, which refers to the street where the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters of the Argentine capital is located, was filmed with the collaboration of many students from the university and is the first comedy by the filmmakers, a genre that serves as a political weapon to denounce the crisis anticipated by the film, released shortly before the elections that gave power to the far-right Javier Milei.
The film is a portrait of university life, of the conflicts that fall like a stone in the classrooms and of the solidarity that is generated. Puan alludes to the dissemination of ideas that invite reflection, to the power of sharing thoughts that travel from the classroom to the street. And above all, the power of laughter. Because with humor and dialogues as stimulating as those distilled in this story, the implicit denunciation has a stronger impact.
