The opening sequence of The Fish Child shows the protagonist, Lala, crossing the bridge between Argentina and Paraguay. This sequence is composed of two different timeframes, the present, which is Lala‟s journey, and the past, which is reconstructed by flashback scenes. On her way to Paraguay, Lala sees on television in a bar that her Paraguayan maid and lover, Guayi, is suspected of committing a crime. The image on the television and the constant interplay between past and present demonstrate Lala‟s involvement with Guayi, the 20-year-old Paraguayan maid working at her home, while suggesting that Lala's journey has something to do with the news item and may actually be a getaway. The alternation between Lala‟s journey and the flashback scene that shows her and Guayi looking at the map while
198 planning their escape to Paraguay indicates that the route followed by Lala in the present is the same one that she had previously planned with Guayi. The narrative establishes the border as one of its key signifiers, a notion underscored by the direct cut from the map in frame to the territory it represents, more precisely, the geographical border between Argentina and Paraguay, the famous „Pasarela Internacional de la Amistad‟ footbridge that links Clorinda, Argentina to Nanawa, Paraguay (Figure 17).
17. Direct cut from the map to the territory (border) it represents.
Lala, the Argentine teenager, crosses the Pasarela Internacional de la Amistad (International Footbridge of Friendship), observing the other pedestrians, who are usually engaged in cross-border activities such as commerce. In this sequence it is clear that the borders in the film also signify class divisions. In fact the border-crossing experience is included in this film in order to show how the protagonist‟s life has been shaped by her relationship with the „other‟. Leading a middle-class Argentine girl away from Buenos Aires and towards the „other‟, the bridge, as a representation of escape, is of course accorded a particular significance in Argentina‟s experience of globalisation. In Chapters 3 and 4, we already saw that the desire to leave Buenos Aires and the resultant breakdown of family unity is a theme explored in Trapero‟s Born and Bred and Burman‟s Lost Embrace.
Although the geographical border, a footpath that suggests the movement of coming and going, is depicted only at the beginning of the film when Lala crosses it, the narrative implies that the characters cross borders more than once. This movement is also portrayed by the people surrounding Lala as they are walking in opposite directions. In fact the footpath itself is a representation of the changing
199 function and meaning of borders in the context of regionalisation. The relationship between the characters also affects the filmic representation of border crossing and the opening sequence clearly signifies the frontier between Argentina and Paraguay as a locus of exchange and conflict. This frontier acquires a metaphorical importance in the narrative as the existence of racial stereotypes is central to the plot and the development of the story. In portraying the actual border as a footpath and engaging with issues of hybridisation and ethnicity, the film shows that imagined borders can be more rigid and active than the real ones. The filmic representation of borders, both cultural and geographical, reveals that an integrationist perspective on cultural exchange can be ambiguous. If on the one hand the footpath, or the bridge, allows Paraguayans such as Guayi to work in Argentina and the Argentine girl to go to Paraguay, on the other, the lack of interaction between people in the border areas is notable. In the narrative, the bridge is symbolic of the relationship between the Argentine and Paraguayan characters, establishing an extended metaphor of both the cultural tension and cooperation between these two countries. Lala is walking towards the sign that indicates „Customs Argentina- Paraguay Footbridge of Friendship‟, a name which recalls the discourses of „friendship‟ and „brotherhood‟
between the member countries promoted by Mercosur. Like the previously mentioned The Pope’s Toilet, it also engages with discourses on regional
„brotherhood‟ so as to challenge them, by showing how fixed notions of national identity remain strong at the border zone. In a similar way, the representation of borders in The Fish Child challenges the idea explicit in the very name of the bridge as the protagonist has no interaction with people around her, let alone friendship.
The film shows the intense informal commerce in the frontier zone and creates a stark contrast between the other people crossing the border and the protagonist, who stares at people passing by with curiosity, hinting that she does not belong to that environment.
Lala‟s border crossing is above all a catalyst for scenes that enable Puenzo to portray the Paraguayan character‟s background and reconstruct Guayi‟s past. The representation of the shores of lake Ypoá and the use of a pre-modern element of Paraguayan culture, which the legend of „the fish child‟ signifies, create a stark contrast with Lala‟s life in the suburbs of Buenos Aires. This contrast between Argentina as modern and Paraguay as archaic is underscored in the montage that
200 intercuts Lala‟s arrival in Paraguay, showing informal commerce and precarious work, and the flashback scene of the party in her house in Buenos Aires. The film uses the experience of the Paraguayan girl, constructed as „other‟ from an Argentine perspective, to address issues pertinent to contemporary Argentine society. For instance, the narrative problematises the stereotyping of immigrants as the only perpetrators of crime, as the white Argentine girl murders her father and also steals money. However, it also reminds us of the existence of such stereotypes in Argentina, as the Paraguayan character is the only one who is punished and sent to prison. By exposing the ethnic and cultural tensions in the intimate relationship between a rich Argentine girl and a Paraguayan maid of indigenous descent, The Fish Child brings together individual and socially-grounded anxieties that underscore the subordination of the Paraguayan subject. The Paraguayan maid is initially the object of the gaze of the Argentineans she meets, including Lala and her father. Like the Paraguayan character in the film Bolivia, Guayi is fetishised, wears a maid uniform and experiences sexual harassment throughout the narrative.
Despite the film‟s basically essentialist vision of Paraguayan identity, the narrative suggests unbridgeable discontinuities between ethnicities and nations in the Southern Cone by focusing on the intimate relationship between the two characters and using a bridge, a viaduct that symbolises exchange as the frontier between the countries. When Lala crosses the border, the narrative subsequently strives to represent the points of view of both Argentine and Paraguayan characters.
This becomes clear when the last scene of the film portrays the characters looking eye to eye, suggesting an identification between Lala and the subject of discrimination. Furthermore, Lala expresses her desire to invert roles with Guayi, when she tries to serve the guest, annoying her mother who does not let her. Lala‟s attempt to swap roles with Guayi suggests that border crossing is also very much related to class, an idea introduced formally at the beginning of the film, when Lala crosses the border for the first time and is seen as alien to that environment.
Another contemporary Argentine film that uses borders as a getaway is Lion’s Den (Leonera, Pablo Trapero, 2007), a coproduction between Argentina and Brazil.
Like The Fish Child, Lion’s Den interweaves border crossing, crime and the breakdown of the family unit. In the final sequence the protagonist crosses the river