An atmospheric and richly layered police procedural written and directed by Argentinian director Juan Jose Campanella is a welcome relief from Hollywood’s testosterone-driven take on this genre. The investigation is mixed with hints of an unrealized romance, finely drawn personalities, and a realization of the deep horrors that lie hidden within the human spirit. The Secret in Their Eyes won the 2010 Oscar for best foreign language film, beating out recently screened nominees The White Ribbon (Das Weisse Band) and A Prophet (Un Prophete).
The Secret in Their Eyes (El Secreto de Sus Ojos) starts out with former federal justice agent Benjamin Esposito (Ricardo Darin) revisiting a cold case that has haunted him for years. It is a little more than a whim, though he explains it as a way of filling out his retirement. In fact, it sucks him right back into events of 20 years ago.
The story mixes Esposito’s research for a book he wants to write about the case with flashbacks of the original investigation, and an important theme is that of memory, of how it insinuates itself into our minds, confusing us about the things we thought we knew. Amid the ambiguity of what might actually have happened, director Campanella keeps the story on message, quite a remarkable achievement with such complicated material. Campanella’s experience as a director on TV series such as Law and Order: Special Victims Unit and House M.D. shows in the film’s tight structure and slick execution, and he manages to pack a huge amount of material into just over two hours. This is crime drama at its best, with the focus firmly on how people think (what they say and how they act, and the disjunction between the two), rather than on crime, or for that matter, justice.
Esposito’s research brings him back into contact with Irene Menendez-Hastings (Soledad Villamil), now a district attorney, but then a newly hired department head trying to establish herself amid the fierce political in-fighting of a corrupt judiciary. In meeting with his former boss, Esposito finds that the spark that existed between him and Hastings has not been totally extinguished, but old barriers of social class and pay grade have been replaced by those of the taint from an investigation that has festered for too many years.
The story is enlivened by the character of Pablo Sandoval (Guillermo Francella), Esposito’s clerk, a wily philosopher about human ways and an incorrigible alcoholic. Sandoval, with his mixture of acute perceptiveness and bumbling incompetence, is one of the great police sidekicks of all time, and plays off wonderfully against Esposito’s more polished presence.
While memory plays plenty of tricks on Esposito as he tries to bring the threads of a decades-old case back together again, an unwillingness to forget ravages the soul of Ricardo Morales (Pablo Rago), whose wife was the victim of a savage rape and murder. For Morales, forgiveness is an act of betrayal, though the justice he seeks opens the door to a new kind of horror.
There is a strong subtext about coming to terms with past crimes, not least those of Argentina’s various unsavory political regimes, which are hinted at, but kept very much in the background.
The Secret in Their Eyes has mastered the difficult art of the slow burn, drawing the audience deeper into the emotions of the people characters, keeping them off balance, and never allowing them an easy sympathy with “the good guys.” Everyone, good and bad, has secrets hidden behind their eyes, if only you could
see them.
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