Critics reviews

The film's comedy comes in two forms: the perverse ingenuity linking one scene to the next, and the specific jokes in each one... Rejtman's sense of humor is one worth acquiring, but even if it remains inaccessible to viewers, his feel for place-based inertia reveals an ambition belied by his films' modest surfaces.

Rejtman has no interest in playing with his audience, nor does he seem to want to intimate that there is an overarching structuring device that will ground his story or clarify his intent. One could see the Argentinean director's entire film as a mere digression, but that would belittle its characters, who have agency, even if they act in ways unexpected in our usual definitions of cinema.

The droll, shape-shifting "Two Shots Fired," the newest movie from the Argentine filmmaker Martín Rejtman (the subject of a current retrospective at the Film Society of Lincoln Center), accomplishes the strange feat of constantly thwarting expectations without ever varying its tone or moving the needle of excitement.

Rejtman and DP Lucio Bonelli maintain a certain distance from these resigned characters, while Mariano and company themselves seem helpless to deviate from their bumpy trajectories. Modulating the game cast into an intelligent design and never throwing up his hands in whimsy, Rejtman understands his characters' travails without giving the film over to anyone entirely, and in so doing portrays their places in the world all the more aptly.

The bleakness in Two Shots Fired complements its unpredictable narrative and extravagant parade of characters, all of them adrift in an era not truly specified in time when cell phones were still primitive and nobody was connected through the Web.

Rejtman was a key early figure of the New Argentinian Cinema, and Two Shots signals a convincing return to deadpan form after a ten-year hiatus from features.

By revealing the tenuous and shifting connections between these people only at the end, the film was teaching me to understand its own peculiarity. It made me want to watch it again, much more carefully, just as, arguably, the characters themselves need to examine their own absurdly tragic situation with a greater insight.

A third act jaunt to the beach with characters we don't know that well doesn't quite pay off, but changing focus so brazenly takes guts. Rejtman plainly sees things in a way few other directors do... "Two Shots Fired" is on its own time and while getting in sync might take a little effort, it's a bewitching state of mind in which to exist. Anything can happen, and none of it is by accident.

[The film] presents a willful, often irritating refusal to explain itself, growing more mystifying as its narrative expands. A droll, careful, and formally consistent film, it otherwise hides its intentions beneath a web of seemingly helter-skelter plotting, opting for a progression of anecdotal, flatly rendered story fragments, linked only by family relationships, subtle recurring symbols, and a shared sense of low-key absurdity.

Rejtman's Two Shots Fired serves up a placid series of largely unrelated vignettes, indulging in drollery for drollery's sake. Two shots do in fact get fired, into a head and a stomach at point-blank range; it's typical of the film's ultra-low-key approach that the bullets do no real damage.

[Rejtman's] fatalistic, obsessive-compulsive, bone-dry jokes get funnier and more profound the longer they are kept up, until they start to sink in the viewer's stomach like a dead weight... It's at once his least intrinsically satisfying film and the most perfect expression of his career-long theme: the suffocating straitjackets in which young urban men and women wrap themselves as a way of dealing, or coping, with one another.

[Two Shots Fired] cast a spell over me. Oscillating between the banal and the absurd in its portrait of Argentine bourgeoisie, the film's unease and quiet paranoia are reminiscent of 2012′s Neighboring Sounds... Rejtman's restless narrative moves in unexpected directions and widens outwards, with different characters moving in and out of focus, before circling back to the mystery of the gunshots.