Biniez's titular hulking loner, Jara (Horatio Camandule), is a security guard at a supermarket in Montevideo. Working the night-shift, he sits in a cramped office scrolling through video feeds showing what the cleaning women, butchers, and stock room guys are getting up to when the supervisor isn't around. In between ignoring petty thefts and endemic goofing-off, Jara does crosswords, naps, listens to heavy metal, and assiduously avoids just about any verbal interaction with his coworkers. He works, goes home, and repeats, only occasionally varying it by picking up an extra shift as a nightclub bouncer or playing video games with his nephew.
What kicks this serenely-paced film into (relatively speaking) gear is Jara's sighting of cleaning woman Julia (Leonor Svarcas). You can tell that the phlegmatic Jara is interested, because he stops doing crosswords and takes to following Julia when she leaves work. Jara tracks Julia after each shift as she runs errands or goes to the beach, quiet surveillance in the glowing morning light of the light-shift worker (all captured in sharp, classical compositions by cinematographer Arauco Hernández Holz).
Jara's stalking begins to creep upward in its length and sophistication, as he intervenes behind the scenes to help her out with a vindictive manager and goes so far as to trail her when she goes on a date. (The latter is the most difficult-to-believe scene in the film, the way Jara watches her over his shoulder in the restaurant, she would have to be blind not to have noticed.) Through it all, Julia is seen nearly always at a distance, across a crowded street or on the video screen. She hardly exists as a person.
Many other filmmakers might have tried to make Jara repulsive, making him look like a slob to amp up the ick factor at all possible. Either that or made him into a caricature of a gentle giant, looming and initially frightening but ultimately as safe as a teddy bear. But though Biniez uses Jara's bulk as central ingredient to her film, she doesn't let it become the limit of his existence.
Camandule's preternaturally subdued performance is the centerpiece of the film, an almost narcotic glide through life that's peppered with occasional eruptions. Jara seems to let his size do his speaking for him, seeming to know that what would be taken as rude silence from somebody of lesser stature is allowed to pass because of his ability -- showcased in one brief and utterly conclusive street fight later in the film -- to lay out most any opponent with ease.
It's that hint of violence, more so than Biniez's precise and controlled direction, that keeps such a quiet, nearly silent, film as Gigante moving along as it does. The film is almost as voyeuristic as its main character. Given so small a window into the character of this man with the hooded eyes and (very) few words, the audience has to watch him just as he watches her. Though Biniez' insistence on using as few plot points as possible is inarguably frustrating, for her care of artistry and gracious attitude, Gigante makes a little frustration more than worthwhile.
Be mad.
