Algo viejo, algo nuevo, algo prestado (Something Old, Something New, Something Borrowed). 2024. Argentina/Portugal/Spain. Directed by Hernán Rosselli. New York premiere. In Spanish; English subtitles. 100 min.
“I come from a vertiginous country, where the lottery is a major part of reality,” the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges once observed. Few are untouched by the quinela, the clandestine lottery system, which has operated as a shadow economy since Argentina’s very founding, lining the pockets of politicians and police and lifting some families out of poverty while throwing others deeply into debt. Director Hernán Rosselli’s own mother, like so many divorcées and widows with young children, once worked in this lottery system, and this experience was the spur to his portrait of one influential family, the Felpetos, who are riven by paranoia and recrimination amid rumors of an imminent raid on their underground sports-betting operation. The best true-crime stories are always told by unreliable narrators—the self-aggrandizing criminals themselves—and Rosselli has woven together these embellishments with home movie and CCTV footage to create a darkling vision of Borgesian delusion.