“La Vida Util” (“A Useful Life”) puts its audience through an unpleasant melancholia.

The Uruguayan film, directed by Federico Veiroj, tells the story of Jorge (Jorge Jellinek), a movie-theater employee who is forced to refocus his life after his movie theater is shut down. Jorge had worked there for 25 years.

According to imdb, none of the principle actors in “La Vida Util” have any credits prior to working with Veiroj. Futhermore, a title card at the beginning of the film assures the audience that the events they are about to see have nothing to do with the real Cinemataca.

Why was “A Useful Life” not a documentary, then? If it seems to be about familiar events with an unknown cast presumably playing themselves (each of the character’s names is the first name of the actor playing him/her) why make this a feature?

“La Vida Util,” at only 70 minutes, is a very long 70 minutes. While Veiroj stays true to his commitment to minimalism, shooting in black-and-white and using long, static shots, his film has no narrative momentum. It seems to be a slice-of-life piece, but then tries to complete an arc in the final third of the film that it never successfully established in the previous 50 minutes.

While it looks great in black-and-white and is the work of a true cinephile, “La Vida Util,” feels overworked and oddly uninspired. It’s never good if your film leaves your audience wondering why it was made. There is no urgency to “La Vida Util,” no sense that this is a story that had to be told, that you just have to see it.

An aesthetic switch in the final portion of the film was intriguing, though. Instead of using a minimalist aesthetic exclusively, Veiroj starts to introduce romantic nods to cinema history in his own film. Specifically, the soundtrack that follows Jorge on his picaresque often blasts the orchestral overtures one might see in classic films. Clever, sure, but that point, who cares? I cannot rescue the audience from the previous hour of melancholia.

I seldom say this, but I feel like I might have missed a large portion of what “La Vida Util” was up to. Perhaps that is a charitable claim to justify my disliking of it, but the film is never stupid or too simple. It might be too intimate or too overwrought, but one does get a since that the creative forces behind “La Vid Util” were up to something. Unfortunately, that endeavor never quite made it to the screen. The existential journey lasts too briefly, like it was tacked on as an afterthought. It should have arrived sooner in the narrative.

2/5