First things first: many thanks to Ken Robidoux for entrusting me with this first-ever film column on Connotation Press, the hardest-working literary site on the web. My goal—our goal—is not so much a review column of recent films, good or bad, but rather to provide a closer look at movies worth looking at, whether recent or vintage, and perhaps to entice you, the reader, to check them out again or for the first time if they’re new to you. Not every review here will be a rave (or by me, for that matter), but every movie reviewed will be one that I consider well worth your time and attention.

 

I’m going to start with the film that has stayed with me longer than any other from the past three years or so. Is it about demolition experts in Iraq? No, though I liked that one. Is it about the renegade Ivy League undergrad who forever changed the medium you’re currently using? No, though that too was a spectacular piece of filmmaking. Nor is it about that unnoticed, micro-budget indie about a disabled soldier gone native on a faraway paradise planet.

 

The Secret In Their Eyes (El Secreto de Sus Ojos) is an Argentine crime thriller, directed by Juan Jose Campanella, co-written with and based on Edward Sacheri’s novel, La Pregunta de Sus Ojos. One of the most successful movies in Argentina, it ought to be familiar to North American moviegoers as well. However, as with most winners of the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, it is more likely to have been “disappeared” (to borrow an Argentine phrase) from the American consciousness. That it also won the Goya Award for Best Spanish Language Foreign Film of 2009 (the Spanish Oscar) may have just made things worse.

 

To say this is a crime thriller is accurate, but hardly complete.  It is much, much more: a tale of fear and desire, of how the pain of loss can destroy a life, freeze it in place, and of how the past can either imprison or set us free. It’s also a delicate and charming love story. What Campanella and his team add to what’s in the source material is a master class in film technique and in acting for the camera. Campanella, born in Argentina, has done not only many films there, but extensive TV work in the US as well, which may explain how he manages to blend Latin with American sensibilities, ending up with the best of both.

 

Told in flashback, the story, as suggested by the title, is largely carried by close-ups of the actors’ faces—and what faces they are. Ricardo Darin as working class cop Benjamin Esposito and Soledad Villamil as his uppercrust boss Irene Menendez-Hastings are attractive without being distractingly stunning. These are people whom one feels have lived and have suffered without having lost their innocence or their longings. Their chemistry is electric and real, both as young professionals in the late ‘70’s--brought together by a brutal case of rape and murder, and falling in unspoken love in spite of themselves and their seemingly insuperable class differences--and when they reconnect twenty-five years later, as Benjamin decides to write a novel about the case that has haunted him for half his lifetime.

 

The investigation centers on a case Benjamin at first hopes to fob off on to some other policeman (the movie is full of deft humor about how he and his alcoholic partner try to find ways of dodging unpleasant assignments, such as telling people calling in to their office that this is a sperm bank and does the caller wish to make a withdrawal or a deposit); but when Benjamin enters the crime scene and sees the young girl lying dead, it becomes the case he’ll never stop investigating. What Campanella does here visually--in brief close-ups, fragmentary images of the dead girl, and in slow, lingering shots of Benjamin’s face, registering his unexpected grief--is hauntingly accentuated by the sound track. It transitions from the bustle and noise of the police station and the city, to the quieter scene of the crime, to Benjamin’s own internal state of mind as everything becomes muted except for the shallow bursts of his own breathing. Later, there’s a similarly effective combination as the scene explores the quiet but intense torment of the dead woman’s young husband.

 

Benjamin and Irene manage to capture the sociopathic killer and secure a confession, in a scene so creepy it makes your skin crawl. However, they soon learn to their horror that the killer has been released: a corrupt colleague whom Benjamin had antagonized has been promoted to a high position in Argentina’s secret police (notorious in the 1970’s for murdering opponents of the regime) and has decided that the killer is more useful as an assassin than as a prisoner. There’s nothing either Benjamin or Irene can do about it, a fact made clear in a queasy scene where the killer shares an elevator ride with them, working the action on his government-issued pistol as he stares smugly at them in the elevator’s mirrored doors.

 

And then, the killer vanishes altogether, which, years later, provides the mystery that the now-retired Benjamin is attempting to untangle in his novel.

 

However, the film refuses to get diverted into heavy-handed politics (seemingly as unavoidable in Latin American films as interminable meditations on sex are in French films). The focus remains on the personal. The camera work throughout effortlessly captures the emotional ebb and flow of the story, such as the long, wide, spectacular fluid master establishing a packed soccer stadium that closes into a chaotic, claustrophobic chase through the bowels of the structure, or Benjamin’s nervous, adrenalized night-time approach to the heart of the mystery. The back and forth through time and memory, the subplots and bits of wry humor (such as a faulty old typewriter that keeps making an unwelcome appearance) provide this thriller with a much deeper soul. The combination of fine acting and the director’s trust in allowing each scene to breathe allows us to uncover the secrets in the eyes of each of these beautifully drawn characters, as their lives intersect along paths of tragedy, acceptance and passion.