The Paranoids, Gabriel Medina's first feature film, follows the hilarious antics of weirdo Luciano Gauna, wittily played by Daniel Hendler. An aspiring screenwriter from Buenos Aires, he lives in fear of success, STDs and – especially – his doorman. We meet Luciano during one of his typically awkward days: he has a narcoleptic attack on the job (he's a children's entertainer, to boot), obsessively calls an HIV helpline after a random sexual encounter and accidentally sends his best friend to the hospital after slamming a door in his face.
Things become even more uncomfortable when Luciano's childhood friend Manuel returns to Buenos Aires from Madrid, where he is the producer of a successful television show called The Paranoids. Manuel is in town to make an Argentine version of the hit, and Luciano becomes especially perturbed when he discovers that he provided the inspiration for the show's main character, who even shares his name.
When Manuel leaves on a business trip to Chile, his beautiful new girlfriend Sofiá (Jazmín Stuart) decides to stay with Luciano, a turn of events that amounts to a nightmare for her fearful host. At first, Sofiá sees Luciano superficially; to her, he is just the paranoid freak her boyfriend has described. After spending time with him, however, she begins to see Luciano for what he is – a misunderstood, honest and genuine person. In sum, he is the complete opposite of Manuel.
Medina's debut is an offbeat comedy that demonstrates a fresh, new facet of the cinema emerging from Argentina. The humour is due in large part to the film's visually innovative approach and its choreographic stylization of daily life, which includes a hilarious, rather passionate scene of dance-floor coitus. Finding its laughs not in clichés but in these wonderfully human characters, The Paranoids offers valuable advice about the muddy moral boundaries artists face when putting the people they know into their work.
Diana Sanchez
Gabriel Medina was born in Buenos Aires and studied film at the Universidad del Cine. He has directed several short films and the television documentary series Urban Mysteries. The Paranoids (08), for which he also wrote the screenplay, is his feature-directing debut.