The film that beat out The White Ribbon and A Prophet to this year’s Best Foreign Language Film Oscar opens in limited release in the UK this weekend but did Argentinian thriller The Secret In Their Eyes deserve to beat out two such acclaimed films?
This year’s Oscar ceremony had little in the way of surprise but one win that likely ruined quite a few betting slips was in the Foreign Language category. Thought to be a 2-horse race between Cannes 1st and 2nd prize winners, Jacques Audiard’s A Prophet and Michael Haneke’s The White Ribbon, the Academy instead gave us a bit of a shock (which conversely shouldn’t surprise given their form in this award over the last few years) by instead awarding the prize to the at the time little seen and certainly little talked of thriller The Secret In Their Eyes. Say what you want about the Oscars on the whole but the people behind this film must now be fans eternal as with this win, they got more exposure than they could have hoped for and the film currently sees itself sat at #169 in the IMDB Top 250. This wave of praise hasn’t quite got the film a release that other successful crossovers have, in fact unless you are in a city then good luck with finding it on the big screen, but unlike the favourites in the Oscar race, this film has a good amount of commercial appeal, blending procedual policework with a decades long romance and visceral filmmaking.
Retired Counselor Benjamin Esposito (Ricardo Darin) has begun to write a based on true events novel which detail the case of a rape-murder that never quite wrapped up in his mind. In flashbacks we see the investigation take place as Esposito works with his deputy Sandoval (Guillermo Francella) and his boss and also unrequited love Irene (Soledad Villamil) to try and catch the man responsible and also maybe manage to start having a relationship with his boss that involves more than paperwork.
What strikes first about The Secret In Their Eyes is how it never tries to be “worthy”. When you think of award winning foreign language material, you would be forgiven if you imagine serious, high-minded, “important” filmmaking, something that I felt really detracted from the effect of The White Ribbon for example but with TSITE, you never get this sense. While it does have things to say about certain areas of society, the film plays out like a mature and intelligent thriller which you just hope and dream Hollywood would make more of today. It is also a film in which the little moments of performance mean just as much as the more obvious, but still damn effective visual stuff on show. While this film does have a rape-murder at its centre, it almost plays out as a Macguffin in this film as screenwriter/director Juan Jose Campanella instead focuses on what such a traumatic event can do to both the people directly effected, here Morales played by Pablo Rago, but also those who are entrusted to capture and bring to “justice” the person who committed such a disgusting crime. This is pulled off wholly successfully as while the end of the film wraps up the story which kicked off the events of the plot in a canny case of cinematic misdirection, the audience will likely be more interested in just how Esposito will react to this, as the emotions that are brought out in the solving of the case are almost exactly mirrored by his harbouring of his love for his former boss Irene. Tying together a murder plot and a decades long potential romance is a pretty bloody hard trick to pull off but Campanella manages it with ease, with snippets of dialogues, looks in people’s faces and yes their eyes all combining to both investigate the murder and also further along a potential romance with a hell of a lot of problems facing it.
This isn’t to say that it’s all character though and instead while the film could have been somewhat stagey, Campanella never forgets that this is something for the big screen and so uses handheld camerawork, a great many close ups and clever editing throughout to make the film a viscreal experience. However, none of this prepares you for the standout sequence of the film visually as we get in what at least appears to be one shot, a camera diving out from the sky, into a football stadium before breaking out into an intense and incredibly exciting chase sequence where you will have no idea where it will end. It is showy and in terms of the rest of the film it’s a tad out of place but its a real shot in the arm and sets you up well for the 2nd half of the film and is also one of the best scenes you will see in any film this year. The fact that it is then followed by one of the most intense “good cop, bad cop” scenes in ages and it’s almost like Campanella is showing off. He’s not though, he’s just a real talent.
Lead couple Ricardo Darin and Soledad Villamil are terrific, both playing themselves in each timeline with the help of decent make-up, displaying a quietly heartbreaking chemistry throughout and both displaying a steely determination which really gets you on side. Villamil also never has to play the damsel in distress which I also appreciated. Having her be in charge throughout creates an interesting dynamic and while Darin’s character disobeys orders a few times, you know he always respects her. Guillermo Francella gets a bit of the small straw with a character who did need fleshing out, an alcoholic who provides comic relief before getting serious later, he feels more of a burden to the story for too long of the film’s runtime and while he saves himself in the end with a terrific final scene, its a rare misstep in the film’s narrative on the whole as Francella does perfectly well with what he had but with all the other plotting going on it feels underserved by the screenplay. Lastly, Pablo Rago is superb as the husband who finds that his life has come to a stop, relying on Esposito to find the man who took away his love, never bowing down to easy histrionics, its a subtle performance which will hopefully get him some attention from Hollywood casting agents.
A story about the danger in looking back at your past life, how it can cripple you and how without doing it you can be set free, The Secret In Their Eyes is a wonderful 2 hours of cinema combining solid performances, a complex but always coherent narrative and a large amount of visual flair which is only slightly undone by occasional lapses in judgement and is well deserving of the acclaim it has received. If you need a little breather before diving back into summer films, you could hardly do better.
9/10
