It is quite difficult to describe precisely what it is like to win an Academy Award, to receive society’s ultimate validation of one’s talents and efforts in film.
In an interview with The Diamondback, Juan Jose Campanella, the director of The Secret In Their Eyes, the 2010 best foreign film award winner, tried anyway.
“At the moment, you have to contain your happiness so much to be able to say something coherent as you go to the stage,” Campanella said. “You have to repress the emotions so much that they almost cut off the happiness it creates. It really was a big honor, but I don’t think I was able to celebrate it as much as I wanted.”
Considering the merits and thrilling rewards of The Secret In Their Eyes and its unexpected victory over the unflinchingly artistic, critically lauded The White Ribbon, his film’s closest contender in the category, Campanella deserved every second he received at the podium and more.
The film begins as so few films with intricate narratives do: naturally. Although the viewer is presented with a rush of crucial information and exposition, there is nothing hurried about it, reflecting Campanella’s comfort with the story.
The voice of famed Argentine leading man Ricardo Darín (Lovely Loneliness) who plays Argentine prosecutor Benjamín Esposito, guides the audience into a gruesome rape and murder plot, which frames the film. A newly retired lawyer, Esposito begins to compose his memoirs and in effect, rewrite his past.
The first thing he sees is the broken, tender description of Ricardo Morales’ (an achingly good Pablo Rago, 100% lucha, el amo de los clones) last morning with his wife. We never see the graphic particulars of her death or even her life, just her sprawled, mangled corpse and eventually, the eyes of the man responsible for her rape and murder, Isidoro Gómez (Javier Godino, Deception).
When Gómez goes free due to petty bureaucratic treachery, the Hitchcockian framework of the film — a clever killer maneuvering out of the consequences of his crime — reveals itself. However, within the story, there is much humanism and many well-played relationships to add levity and heart to the film.
Esposito has great buddy-cop chemistry with his drunken fellow prosecutor Pablo Sandoval (Guillermo Francella, Rudo Y Cursi) and a deep romantic tension with his boss and socio-economic superior, Irene Menendéz Hastings (Soledad Villamil, It’s Not You, It’s Me).
Campanella discussed how he integrated the various moods within the film.
“What sets the movie apart from other movies is precisely that mix of things: the love story with comedy in it and then the crime mystery above that. It’s very hard to simplify it, and you can’t,” Campanella said. “That’s what works within the movie. I really wanted to try a lot of different ingredients in preparing the movie. There they are. It’s very hard to just talk about one of them.”
Equally as important to the serious viewer and of course, Campanella himself, is the look of the film, the way the atmosphere of 1970s Argentina is captured and visually translated for the screen.
“The movie’s shot digitally,” Campanella said. “It’s shot with a RED camera. That allowed us much more flexibility when doing the color correction. The premise we went to was that the past was the color of a memory. When you remember something from 20 years ago, you don’t remember every detail of the room. You remember the main color of the room. … It’s much more colorful in the past than it is in the present.”
Some may be disappointed by the brave, gripping twist at the end while more smug audience members will somehow have seen it coming from the very first frame. Thus, the ultimate problem for Campanella, after having made a movie this well machined becomes how to preserve the sanctity of his ending.
Was he ever tempted to pull a Hitchcock and put a warning to reveal the ending on the movie’s posters?
“Oh yes, very much so. We didn’t get to put that in the ads but very much so. I have to say that people, even the reviewers and all that, are amazingly responsible about it. They don’t want to tell.”
Thus, this review will end here.
vmain13@umdbk.com
RATING: 4.5 out of 5 stars