Argentinean Eyes is a Haunting Collage
It is the one case Argentinean retired criminal court investigator Benjamin Espósito (Ricardo Darin) cannot forget, the brutal rape and murder of a young married woman that left her newlywed husband Ricardo Morales (Pablo Rago) a heartbroken mess. Now, 25 years after the fact, the one-time detective has come to the office of his former superior Irene Menéndez Hastings (Soledad Villamil) to ask for her opinion. He’s decided to write a novel using this case as a starting point, thinking that if he does so the old wounds left be its solving might begin to heal.
Soledad Villamil and Ricardo Darin in Sony Pictures Classics' The Secret in Their Eyes
It instead just opens them deeper and what follows in director Juan José Campanella’s 2010 Oscar winner for Best Foreign Language Film The Secret in Their Eyes (El Secreto de Sus Ojos) is a time-bending police procedural of love, loss and regret that offers up plenty of surprises all while tugging on the heartstrings. And while the murder mystery itself is not all that hard to figure out, the two-plus decade romance at the film’s core is beautifully stirring, the final images a hauntingly heartbreaking collage that brought tears to my eyes.
In other words the movie manages to pack a punch, I’m just not always sure it’s always the one the director intended. A veteran of 17 episodes of “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit,” the director knows his way around a detective story. The problem is, what works for a 42-minute television series doesn’t necessarily translate all that well to a two hour motion picture, the filmmaker revealing his hand way too early to generate much suspense. The identity of the killer is revealed way too soon, and while his capture at a soccer stadium is as bravura a piece of filmmaking as any I’ve seen this year, getting there is so perfunctory the excitement generated by this moment can’t help but be a tiny bit diluted.
That said, the way the director flips back and forth through time, the way he weaves both past and present into such an elegant tapestry of angst and longing, I found myself pleasantly mesmerized by the majority of the movie all the same. More, what I slowly began to realize as things progressed was that this story wasn’t so much a thriller about the hunt for a murderer so much as it was a love story between two people unable to put into words exactly how they feel for one another. This central relationship both broke and enraptured my heart, Benjamin and Irene’s slow waltz one round the other but both still just out of reach of touching keeping my pulse racing at an ever accelerating pace.
Not that the investigation doesn’t offer up a few surprises. I loved how Benjamin’s drunken friend and assistant Pablo Sandoval (Guillermo Francella) is introduced as the film’s comic relief only to quietly morph into one of the smarter and more selfless characters in the film. The pair’s relationship is arguably the strongest thing about Campanella and Eduardo Sacheri’s (adapting from his own novel) script, and the way it becomes the movie’s heart and soul moved me quite deeply.
I also loved the way the narrative refuses to treat Ricardo as an also-ran. His presence, while relatively brief, is hugely important, each line of his dialogue hinting at many of the twists and turns to come. In all honesty, Rago’s heartfelt performance might just be the movie’s best, his last look to the camera as stunning a moment as any I could have hoped for.
Not that I want to cut either Darin or Villamil short. Both are outstanding, and without their give and take and back and forth it goes without saying that this film wouldn’t have been worth the price of the celluloid it was shot on. They have outstanding chemistry, the actors managing to burrow so far inside their respective characters they more or less disappear with only Benjamin and Irene remaining. I wanted them to be together, couldn’t understand why they allowed themselves to stay so far apart, their dance of distance coming hazardously close to ripping my soul in two.
I do get why Campanella’s effort beat out both Germany’s The White Ribbon and France’s A Prophet for the Academy Award. While the subject matter here can get pretty lurid, for all its artifice to the contrary and the narrative’s nonlinear approach the actual point is rather straightforward. At its core this is a movie about love, and if Academy members have proven nothing else over the years they have shown a penchant for giving the Oscar to the nominee that is the most emotionally accessible.
That isn’t meant as a knock against The Secret in Their Eyes. I liked this film, faults and all, and even though I wished the middle portion dealing with the investigation could have been a bit stronger the whirlwind last twenty minutes more than make up for any reservations. I was moved by Benjamin’s story, was emotionally swept up in his search for truth.
Early on Ricardo has a great line where he talks about being unable to decipher between an actual memory or the memory of a memory, that the passage of time has caused him to forget forcing his imagination to pick up the slack. It’s a sad yet touching moment that speaks to so much of life as we know it and about how tragedy’s shadow changes as the days, months and years roll by.
In the end, it is that line between fact and fiction, between memory and imagination that stuck with me most of all. As I get older and face my own regrets I can’t help but wonder sometimes if I’ve colored between the lines of my own history, forgotten the actual event only to make up some imagined facsimile more fitting to the story I fantasize – as so many writers do – of someday telling. That is what The Secret in Their Eyes gets right, and as such this fascinating love story set against the backdrop of a murder becomes even more than the sum of its superbly well assembled parts.
Film Rating: êêê (out of 4)
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