When that action is in the back of an ambulance or the front seat of a car the viewer in right on top of the blood soaked victim, crashing in the nether land of a rolling, bouncing closet. The brutal potholes in the road smash the audience as they open the wounds of the lacerated victim reeling from his unjust, random plight.
Take notice, this film is not for the faint of heart. The central theme is automobile death in modern day Argentina. The country claims the world’s highest road death rate. Relative to cars owned this is five times as high as the USA.
Traffic fatalities are the leading cause of death for Argentineans under the age of 35, with many of the deaths claiming pedestrians crossing the street or walking on the side of the road. Estimates indicate about half of the country’s drivers run one red light a day, including drivers of buses full of passengers.
Trapero’s fast-moving film takes these statistics directly to the audience. Sosa (a riveting performance by “The Secret in Their Eyes” Ricardo Darin) makes his living as an ambulance-chasing lawyer.
His dishonesty moves the film into the self-inflicted plight of many Argentineans, a country with four decades of political unrest, corruption and financial crisis. Sosa has been disbarred but still must make a living in a country that, during his lifetime, has displayed world-class political-brutality and economic breakdown.
Reflecting the hard-hitting nature of the story, the screenplay contains elements of explicit injected drug use and the slow walking death that results. A few scenes from “Requiem for a Dream” come to mind--this film is almost as brutal and hard hitting as Arronofsky’s early masterpiece.
In executing the difficult vehicle interior shots and the chaos and impersonality of urban emergency medical care, the director and screenwriters seemed to be reliving the nightmare of “The Death of Mr. Lazarescu.”
The scene is one hundred percent set in the streets and the queasy-cam gets a lot queasier with the bodies bouncing off the windshields, through the windshields and out of the smashed open doors of over-turning vehicles. Sosa is tortured with solid body blows dealt out repeatedly in the wet, dark gutters and in the front seats of his cheap, faded, broken down automobiles that surely have been resurrected from Mexican junkyards.
Sosa meets emergency medical doctor Luján (Martina Guzman—“Lions’ Den”) early in the film. Their attraction is as immediate as it is unbelievable. This attraction is dangled in front of the audience in a well-paced and effective manner, giving rise to the noir-ish voyeuristic love scenes seen through eyes of that shaky-cam.
Although the two appear to be exact opposites in the beginning, as the story unfolds their paths steer together onto parallel roads to destruction.
Darín appears to have been coached with Paul Newman’s performance as the down on his luck lawyer in “The Verdict” and he is almost as good. The ambulance scenes move the abstract, sci-fi images of “Lazarescu” into real life without losing a bit of the pure, dark threat of death. Darin is the key to this transition.
He combines the shifty-eyed toughness of the man on the skids looking for the right angle with the barely visible foreboding of the condemned.
As in many indie films, the use of the hand-held camera gets a bit tedious and there was not quite enough story to sustain the entire running time of the movie, as a result it flagged a bit in the last 20 minutes.
Perhaps this was accented by the certainty of the outcome. In spite of these small detractions, the film still represents a substantial success for the filmmakers. Both of the leads performed with strength and commitment.
Directed by: Pablo Trapero
Written by: Alejandro Fadel, Martín Mauregui, Santiago Mitre and Pablo Trapero
Starring: Ricardo Darín and Martina Gusman
Runtime: 107 minutes
Source: M&C
Carancho
