I don't know: you wait ages for a meandering and insipid piece of Argentinian slow cinema only for two to come along at once. Much like fellow competition entrant El Primio (The Prize),
Un Mundo Misterioso (A Mysterious World) is by its own admission an eventless slog caught up in the details and lacking in story. The film's clueless and socially inadequate protagonist Boris - played by Esteban Bigliardi, who resembles a hispanic Joel Coen - is suddenly dumped by his girlfriend Ana (Cecilia Rainero) in the first scene, throwing him off balance in a world he can no longer understand. This is the best scene in the film as the conversation is funny, going around and around in circles because he can't understand what she means by "some time apart". "Some time? How much?" he repeatedly asks - of course, she can't say. As the scene continues it becomes amusingly concerned with semantics. Ana will go from saying that "she" wants a break to saying "we" want it. She also calls Boris "buddy", which confuses him further ("you've never called me buddy before.") He also doesn't get it even when she refers to them as "breaking up". "I didn't realise we were breaking up." He is hopelessly guileless, a naïve waif thrown into the wilderness without provisions. Boris is totally unaware of himself, the world around him and his place in it, and the film is about him as he moves through his surroundings attempting to make sense of these abstract things in the mysterious world in which we all live. Any reference to somewhere or something out of his experience falls completely flat, whether it's a discussion of WW2-era Romanian cars or the Brazilian pronunciation of Truman Capote. During a party he is unable to participate fully in a game which sees people take it in turns to shout out the surnames of well-know people in a way which makes one long chain (Neil Simon Le Bon Jovi etc etc). He presumably doesn't have the required cultural knowledge.
He also lacks social understanding and determines to get a new girlfriend by simply following every girl of roughly the same age that he sees on the bus. All women fall under is awkward gaze, but there is no hint that he is in any way dangerous or scary. He's nice enough but just a bit rubbish. Nor is there any hint that he is motivated by sexual desire. He just seeks what he had before with Ana, as it shaped his understanding of the world - I suppose as a metaphor for the uncertainty and feeling of disorientation we all experience after a break up. The film is summed up best by a conversation Boris has in a bookshop about a novel he is recommended. "What happens in the end?" he asks. "Nothing happens. Why should anything happen?" is the appropriate enough reply in a film that works on the same principle. It's not truly bad in that it's nicely shot and has a few fun moments, but it could have been an interesting half-hour short rather than an unemotional and uneventful feature of almost two hours.