Argentine Road Movie Follows Girl With a Gift

Lots of kids would like to believe they can communicate with animals, forming a special bond that only they understand. But for the adorable little girl at the heart of director Iván Fund’s The Message (El mensaje), listening to dogs, cats, turtles, horses and all types of fauna is a moneymaking vocation, and one she exercises with plenty of tender loving care.

This minimalist oddity of a road movie follows Anika (Anika Bootz) and her caretakers, Myriam (Mara Bestelli) and Roger (Marcelo Subiotto), as they tour the Argentine countryside selling the girl’s services in “natural telepathy.” Claiming she can commune with the souls of pets, Anika relates animal “messages” — either directly or through voice mails — to owners wishing to know what Rex or Fluffy or Biscuit are actually thinking. In return, the girl and her guardians live a freewheeling #vanlife, wandering the land like an old circus troupe and parking their RV wherever they please.

With its gorgeous black-and-white photography and laid-back vibes, The Message brings to mind Peter Boganovich’s 1973 classic Paper Moon, which featured a little girl and a con man on the road in Depression-era America. The Argentina depicted in Fund’s movie also feels like it’s going through some tough times, although the director focuses more on the trio’s good-humored journey from place to place as they scrape by off Anika’s magical powers.

The question, of course, is whether this is all a scam or the real thing. But the film never really addresses that issue, nor does it add any kind of underlying plot to its setup. That’s a bit unfortunate because traveling alongside Anika and her hucksters is an altogether pleasant experience, even if it’s one that never evolves into a full story. As such, The Message will ride the festival circuit but will be a harder sell for international distributors.

Working with talented DP Gustave Schiaffino, Fund, who’s a trained cameraman himself, creates a high-contrast, low-budget aesthetic that recalls early Jim Jarmusch works like Stranger Than Paradise and Down by Law, or Wim Wenders movies like Kings of the Road. Capturing the simple beauties of nature, whether it’s domesticated animals at home or horses freely roaming the streets of an abandoned town, he makes The Message easy to watch despite the lack of any underlying narrative tension.

At times the film plays more like documentary than fiction, even if what’s happening has clearly been scripted. The charismatic Zootz is such a natural that she makes Anika’s antics, which involve repeating whatever the puppies or kitties are telepathically telling her, feel completely normal, almost as if she’s bored by her own supernatural abilities.

Meanwhile, Myriam and Roger do their best to keep the business going, handing out flyers, collecting payments and setting up TV news interviews to plug Anika’s talents. Are the two her grandparents or just scheming money off her? Again, the film doesn’t fully answer that question.

One touching scene does show them taking Anika to visit her mother in a psychiatric hospital, but there’s not much dialogue between them and that’s the last we hear of it. There are other moments ripe with backstory — including the fact that Roger was once an actual circus clown, as revealed by old photos — that remain underexploited by Fund, who’s more interested in sustaining a certain mood.

He manages to do that through a breezy 90 minutes, plunging us into a world where man, animal and child seem to exist on the same peaceful plane. At one point late in the action, the van stops by the roadside, where Anika gets out and approaches a wild capybara emerging from the brush. Is she reading its mind as well, or just admiring it like any other kid would? It doesn’t really matter: This is a movie in which the medium, in all senses of the term, counts more than the message.