El secreto de sus ojos
Juan José Campanella (2009)
Surprise winners in the Best Foreign Language Film category at the Oscars are no longer surprising. After the Academy preferred the Japanese Departures to The Class and Waltz with Bashir in 2009 you might have predicted that the close contest between A Prophet and The White Ribbon this year would result in a win for neither. When the prize went to the Argentine entry The Secret in their Eyes, it was hard to avoid thinking that the Academy – because it doesn’t care that much about this category anyway – was simply being contrary. So it’s a pleasant surprise that The Secret in Their Eyes is first rate. (The title is interesting – it’s through that singular ‘secret’ that it avoids being a cliché although it still sounds like a translation.) If it’s not a better film than The White Ribbon, Juan José Campanella’s picture is a cut above any of the ten nominations for Best Picture in this year’s Oscars.
The enduring popularity of detective fiction is sometimes said to reflect our desire to solve the mysteries of existence and for moral order to be restored – with the ratiocinating sleuth our proxy. The particular appeal of stories in which the detective goes back to a crime unsolved or whose resolution was unsatisfying at the time could illustrate another deep-seated human longing – to try and work out things in our own pasts, perhaps our whole pasts, that we can’t make sense of. And because it’s a professional crime-solver who’s doing this, the enterprise has authoritative possibilities that are emotionally compelling: I feel this watching Second Time Around, the only episode of Inspector Morse that I really admire. What makes The Secret in Their Eyes a true psychological thriller is that – as with Second Time Around – the investigation is absorbing in terms of both the attempt to uncover factual truth and the long ago crime’s cumulative effects on the lives of the people involved – and who were denied closure at the time. The traction of these two elements is terrific, thanks to Campanella’s fluent, confident direction and a screenplay which is not just clever but intelligent. (Campanella shares the writing credit with Eduardo Sacheri, the author of the novel on which the movie is based.) You feel in the kinetic grip of an action thriller then realise it’s a double embrace because the characters are gripping too.
There are different strands of unfinished business entangled in the crime that drives the story – the rape and murder in 1974 of Liliana Colotto (Carla Quevedo), a young Buenos Aires housewife. In 1999, Benjamin Esposito (Ricardo Darin), who investigated the assault but who left his job as a federal justice agent some years ago, remains obsessed by the crime: he’s in the process of writing a novel based on it. Those strands gradually emerge: the relationship between Benjamin and his young, Ivy League-educated superior Irene Menéndez-Hastings (Soledad Villamil); trying to discover the whereabouts and afterlife of the bank clerk Ricardo Morales (Pablo Rago), the grief-stricken, traumatised husband of the dead woman, who determined to find her killer and sat in wait for him each day in a Buenos Aires train station; the search too for Liliana’s convicted killer Isidoro Gómez (Javier Godino), following his release – after only a year in prison, thanks to Benjamin’s professional bête noire Romano (Mariano Argento) – to work as a hitman for the right-wing Peronist government; and finding out exactly happened on the night that Benjamin’s droll, alcoholic colleague Sandoval (Guillermo Francella) was killed.
There are so many good things in this richly entertaining film. The long sequence during a match at the Racing Club football stadium, which ends in Gómez’s arrest, has been deservedly praised as a spectacularly skilful piece of action film-making. Benjamin and Sandoval think they’ve got their man only to find it’s not Gómez; as we watch them jostle their way along people in the crowd, Félix Monti’s camera gradually focuses on another face in the line and we suddenly realise this is the long-wanted man. (It’s like an identity parade in motion.) The dialogue, although occasionally too wordy, is more often strong on cynical humour and economically incisive: shortly after Benjamin and Irene meet again in the late 1990s, she mentions her family life – ‘My husband, my children … whom I adore’ – that punctuation may look ambiguous but you know the adoring refers only to the children. This is a rare example of a police drama that gets across in an unstressed but cumulatively undeniable way the idea of professional commitment getting in the way of the detectives’ personal lives. Campanella turns details that seem questionable to his advantage. There’s a melodramatic flashback to a parting between a man on a departing train and a woman running along the platform after the train. The director makes the sequence increasingly hard to pin down: we know it reflects a passage in Benjamin’s novel but is it what happened when he and Irene separated in the 1970s – or is it how he prefers to remember the moment? When Gómez has been arrested and is being interviewed by Benjamin and Irene comes in, her disconcerted reaction to the way the suspect looks at her cleavage appears too deliberate yet Irene then launches into such extraordinary tactics of interrogation – deriding Gómez’s manhood so relentlessly that he’s provoked into a confession of Liliana Colotto’s murder – that your reservations about the start of the sequence are obliterated.
The movement of the actors between the two ages of their character, twenty-five years apart, is impressively effortless – this is especially true of Ricardo Darin as Benjamin. (Except in extreme close-up in the closing stages, the aging make-up is exceptionally convincing too.) Darin’s effects are very subtle: the striking Soledad Villamil as Irene is more obvious as Irene but she’s good at suggesting how this woman uses her professional assurance to deflect personal discomfiture. There’s an excellent bit when Benjamin asks to talk to Irene and the implication that he wants to talk personal unnerves her. She gets up from her desk and says, ‘I’ll just close the door’, to make the time to compose herself. When she gets to the door she finds Sandoval on the other side of it: Benjamin wants him to hear this too. The culminating revelation of what has happened in the years after the murder is a dramatic triumph and a genuinely startling twist on what is often heard from the loved ones of murder victims, expressing their understandable fury at a killer’s release when ‘I’ve got a life sentence’. The final scene of The Secret in Their Eyes can’t hope to emulate the impact of what Benjamin discovers when he tracks down the middle-aged Ricardo Montales but you don’t mind because Juan José Campanella knows this, and engineers a final scene between Benjamin and Irene that you almost laugh at, because it’s such an obvious feelgood appendage. Besides, you feel the pair of them have earned a happy ending.
17 August 2010
