‘Souffleur’ Follows Hotel and Its Fabled Dish on Brink of Collapse

Argentine filmmaker Gastón Solnicki is cooking up his latest feature, “The Souffleur,” which he’ll be presenting during the Venice Gap-Financing Market, which runs Aug. 30 – Sep. 1.

The film tells the story of Lucius Glantz, an American who’s managed the same international hotel in Vienna for 30 years. When he discovers one day that the venerable building is slated to be sold and demolished, he embarks on a quest to stop its destruction, pitting him against a cocky Argentine realtor. As the conflict between them escalates, the hotel’s trademark soufflé mysteriously stops rising, forcing Glantz to confront the prospect of the end of all he holds dear.

Directed by Solnicki off a script he co-wrote with Julia Niemann, “The Souffleur” is produced by Gabriele Kranzelbinder and Eugenio Fernández Abril for Vienna-based Little Magnet Films, Primo and Solnicki’s Argentine production company Filmy Wiktora.

The director tells Variety that the idea for the film stemmed from a “curious, failed experience” at a restaurant in Buenos Aires, when a soufflé was “forced on me in a very sad fashion.”

It was something like a betrayal for Solnicki, who studied cooking in his youth and was “trained in this very military French tradition.” Describing the “torture” of preparing the iconic baked dish, he says: “It’s not something that you just follow a recipe, and it happens. It’s really an act of love and an…act of faith.”

Drawing on elements of surrealism and comedy influenced by the works of Luis Buñuel, “the film plays with this idea of a building that is about to be [demolished], and a dessert that is no longer [able to rise],” Solnicki says. “There are also these feelings of wind, and the whole mythology of wind and God [breathing] life into the world. It brings infinite layers of significance.”

Solnicki’s first narrative feature, “Kékszakállú,” was awarded at its premiere in the Horizons strand of the Venice Film Festival before playing in Toronto and New York. The film, which follows the coming-of-age of a group of female teenagers in Argentina not knowing what to do with their future, was praised by Variety’s Scott Tobias as a “rapturous experimental narrative” that showcased the director’s “uncommon talent.”

His most recent film, “A Little Love Package,” is a cinematic ode to Vienna that chronicles everyday life in the Austrian capital on the cusp of a city-wide smoking ban. It premiered in the Berlin Film Festival’s Encounters strand in 2022.

In recent years, due to the “curious circumstances of my life,” the Argentine has found himself working more and more in Vienna, a city that feels both culturally familiar — his family traces its roots to Central and Eastern Europe — while also holding significance as what he described as the “birthplace of modern music.”

“My films end up being built on real soundscapes,” he says, noting his debut was inspired by Bela Bartok’s opera “Bluebeard’s Castle.” “This idea of absorbing music and idioms of places and the soundscapes…that are often out of reach for more traditional filmmaking — there’s a realm of nuances both in sound, but also in performance, working with non-professional actors, that I find often cinema somehow neglects or, by its own noise, eclipses.”

“The Souffleur” will reunite Solnicki with Portuguese cinematographer Rui Poças, a regular collaborator of Cannes prizewinner Miguel Gomes (“Grand Tour”), while also utilizing the stunning architecture of the Austrian capital as its backdrop.

“Vienna is an incredible location, but there’s no art director, no set designer, no production manager. I’m very much into working in the neo-realistic way with real locations,” Solnicki says.

“I’m still very marked by my early days spying on my family and making these more voyeuristic first-person films. Once you get so tied to this documentary side, it’s very hard to let go of certain artifices.”