The prickly comedy “Magic Farm” is a trip to rural Argentina that feels like flipping through a carousel of ironic souvenir postcards. The latest bit of mischief by filmmaker Amalia Ulman (“El Planeta”), it’s about how making the world smaller hasn’t widened our curiosity as much as shrunk it into snarky bites — in short, it’s about going everywhere and seeing nothing.
Chloë Sevigny plays Edna, the host of a globe-trotting web series that seeks out human interest stories: Bolivian teenage exorcists, Mexican fashionistas in scimitar-shaped boots and now, a singer called Super Carlitos who dresses like a bunny and bops around a village called San Cristobal. The joke is that Edna and her production staff are fundamentally close-minded. Crew members Elena (Ulman), Jeff (Alex Wolff), Justin (Joe Apollonio) and Dave (Simon Rex) claim they make documentaries, but they really only want catchy headlines and traffic. (It may remind you of Vice Magazine, which covered the same Mexican footwear trend in a 2011 article titled “Look at These F— Boots!”)
The film’s own director, however, is a sharp and clever social critic who investigates insincerity. Ulman is something of an online anthropologist-slash-modern artist. Her 2014 breakout took place on Instagram, where she spent months pretending to be an aspiring L.A. “It” girl — even faking a boob job — for a three-act tragedy she later called “Excellences & Perfections.” Her pieces operate on three levels: the superficial, the sarcastic and, buried deep beneath those, an outrage that she holds tight to her chest. Fluent in posturing and hypocrisy, Ulman looks like an influencer and thinks like Luis Buñuel. She’s always sniffing out the scam.
Ulman also acts in “Magic Farm” as Edna’s producer, Elena, with a biography parallel to her own: Argentinian-born, Spanish-raised, cool and detached. Elena comes across as the most together, but what looks like serenity is actually disdain. As the only team member who speaks Spanish, Elena is aware that only she can keep the others from looking like the idiots that they are. She’s often too lazy to bother. In her absence, Rex’s Dave pleads at a desk clerk, “Do you have vape charger para aquí?”
The Super Carlito expedition is doomed to failure. The group isn’t just in the wrong town — they’re in the wrong country. (As is the way of things, Jeff dumps the blame on an offscreen intern he’s schtupping.) Adding to the confusion, their on-site contact Marita (Abuela Marita) has disappeared, possibly in connection with her apocalyptic Christian temple. No one thinks to poke into this with a follow-up question like, “She thinks the world is going to end? When?”
Instead, these American Americans, as the Yankees call themselves, are distracted by the personal dramas they bring to this poor farmland. Justin, a sunny Dirk Diggler clone, has daddy issues that mushroom into a crush on Guillermo Jacubowicz’s nameless hotel receptionist, a humble single father. Meanwhile, narcissistic heartbreaker Jeff snags the attention of San Cristobal’s resident glamour girl Manchi (Camila del Campo), who spends her nights taking selfies for OnlyFans and her days scaling trees to get enough cell service to send them to her subscribers.
It would be a mistake to assume the locals are victims. Their polite English only makes them sound accommodating — they’ve all got their own secrets and desires. Plus, the language gap works in Jeff’s favor, with Manchi fantasizing about him in bed while she tunes into his voice on a podcast, pleasantly oblivious to how he’s prattling on about a bad sushi dinner.
Jacubowicz and Del Campo are amazing discoveries. He has the tender, shining eyes of an ingenue while Del Campo, who has a striking birthmark on her cheek, is a femme fatale able to hold her own against Wolff’s selfish, useless playboy. Flopping around like a boiled noodle, Wolff should be too big for the movie. His performance is the loudest thing in it by an amplitude of 10. (When Edna accuses Jeff of taking too much of the horse tranquilizer ketamine, he whines, “Maybe I am a pony!”) But he and Ulman are having so much fun making fun of Jeff and the faux-woke wastrels he represents that his squawking nonsense comes to harmonize with Burke Battelle’s score, a funky cacophony of synthesizers that sounds like someone bouncing on a duck.
None of these journalists believe they’re serving a higher purpose other than content farming. But Ulman has strung together a net of interesting observations: glances, insults, mistaken presumptions and gaslighting fibs. Nearly all of her characters — including the locals — are spending too much energy creating things for online consumption. They’re all tangled up in a worldwide web.
Every scene has a delight: Manchi stabbing balloons with a knife, Edna’s out-of-place cloven-toed high heels, the lilt in Justin’s voice as he smiles at a street mutt and says, “What’s up, dog?” Cinematographer Carlos Rigo and editor Arturo Sosa groove along with eye-catching colors and skateboard-video-style visuals, even inserting B-roll from a camera strapped to a horse’s head and doing a dramatic zoom to a sheep.
You might wonder if the acid-neon grass is too green. These pseudo-reporters won’t notice. Pay attention to everything they ignore — the buzzing airplanes out of view, the offerings of bottled soda instead of water, the casual background conversations about cancer and death — and you’ll spot that Ulman has seeded another story underneath her comic surface, one about how the people in this town are getting crushed by big business and bad government.
It turns out there’s plenty worth covering in San Cristobal. But Ulman is too skeptical to suggest these yahoos could redeem themselves by ferreting out the real problems happening in her home country. She has zero faith in their interest in real news and not much more in our own. What’s the point of telling the truth if no one will click on it? And how smart to hide her own sincerity inside this marvelous romp.