 |
| Director Andreas Fontana |
AZOR A- Switzerland, France Argentina (100 mi) 2021 d: Andreas Fontana
I would not have been able to base this movie there, without knowing Argentina as well as I do. In every part of the world, when there is a dictatorship, there is this kind of thing. They work with fear… It could have been in South Africa with apartheid, Nicaragua or Brazil. —Andreas Fontana
Argentina is known for dark political thrillers, like Luis Puenzo’s THE OFFICIAL STORY (1985), a Best Foreign Film Academy Award winner, Fabián Bielinsky’s NINE QUEENS (2000), and Juan José Campanella’s THE SECRET IN THEIR EYES (2009), another Best Foreign Film Academy Award winner (beautifully discussed here: Decoding The Secret in Their Eyes: Domestic and ... - Offscreen), sharing the same cinematographer with THE OFFICIAL STORY, with both of the latter films starring actor Ricardo Darín. More recently Benjamín Naishtat’s ROJO (2018) examines the social and political repercussions leading up to the 1976 military junta, as conditions become more and more repressively stifling. This slow drama and political thriller, taking place during the Dirty War of the 80’s in Argentina (30,000 People Were 'Disappeared' in Argentina's Dirty War ...), was actually made by a Swiss director making his first feature film at the relatively mature age of 39, exhibiting a wonderfully measured and controlled direction, perhaps reminiscent of early Claude Chabrol thrillers, yet it exquisitely executes an absorbing, atmospheric feel of those earlier films, as Yvan De Wiel (Fabrizio Rongione), a private banker from Geneva, goes to Argentina in the midst of a dictatorship to replace his partner, René Keys, the subject of disturbing rumors who has disappeared under mysterious circumstances. The country was run by a military junta under the command of General Jorge Rafael Videla, military Commander in Chief, following the 1976 coup, part of the American-led Operation Condor (Operation Condor: The Communist Threat in Latin America), a clandestine CIA policy where an imperialist United States government helped overthrow democratically elected South American governments through regime change, replacing left-wing rulers with right-wing dictatorships, providing CIA planning, coordinating, technical support, and training on torture while supplying military aid to the juntas during the Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, and Reagan administrations. Implementing a campaign of political repression and state terror, with right-wing death squads hunting down not only political dissidents, including students, journalists, trade-unionists, intellectuals, and activists, but also the rich and powerful, stealing their assets, eventually causing the financial equilibrium of the country to collapse, while tens of thousands of people completely disappeared (the desaparecidos), systematically kidnapped, raped, tortured, and killed, with some drugged and thrown out of airplanes, horrific atrocities that initially went unpunished, but only after the discovery of secret police archives (like the East German Stasi), 900 former members of the junta were subsequently tried and convicted of crimes. The idea for the film came from the director reading his grandfather’s journal about a tourist trip to Argentina he had made in 1980 when he was a private banker, where he was struck by the absence of any political reference, something that was clearly in the air, yet any recollection was discreetly purged (though it did mention the election of the American President Ronald Reagan). The film explicitly calls attention to the supposed neutrality of the Swiss, turning a blind eye to what was happening right under their noses as they routinely conducted business as usual with a murderous cabal. Written by Fontana and Mariano Llinás, an Argentine writer/director/producer, the story concerns Argentina’s moneyed elite at the time, resembling the oppressive luxury of Lucrecia Martel’s LA CIÉNAGA (2001), where the slow roll-out of characters from an upper echelon bourgeoisie become symbols for creeping social decay. Yvan arrives in Buenos Aires with his wife Inés, Stéphanie Cléau, previously seen in Pierre Godeau’s Down By Love (Éperdument) (2016), where his role is to reconnect with the client portfolio of the missing Keys, with much of this playing out like Antonioni’s THE PASSENGER (1975), where Jack Nicholson assumes the role of a deceased gun runner, keeping his appointments, never really knowing just what he’ll discover. Key to Yvan’s success is earning the trust of his customers, as only then are they willing to part with their money. According to every client Yvan meets, Keys was a master in his role, having laid the groundwork, supremely knowledgeable of the terrain, with many considering him a reliable and resourceful friend, while others found his behavior deplorable, with a habit of being aggressively risky and morally corrupt, but most especially he was viewed as dangerous, an unseen villain whose exploits dominate the conversation, like Harry Lime in THE THIRD MAN (1949). But everyone agrees that he was a brilliant, unforgettable character. Yvan, on the other hand, is the picture of Swiss reserve, cautious and more conservative, always circumspect, never making grandiose promises or jumping into risky investments, with some immediately finding him less skilled in playing the game, perhaps too detached for their liking. Yvan feels like the ghost of Keys is always one step ahead of him, finding it hard to find traction.
In the world of private Swiss banking, one assumes the family heritage like a rite of passage, as families run banks that have been passed down from generation to generation. As Yvan moves from one nervous customer to the next, making what is described in banking context as “the camel’s tour,” visiting lounges, swimming pools, and exclusive clubs of the wealthy, he meets landowners, jetsetters, horse trainers, ministers, bishops, ambassadors, bankers, and their sourpuss lawyers, yet everyone’s manners are impeccable as he visits the mandatory castles and villas nestled into the massive lands of this distant country, where we keep hearing the same refrain, that times are dark, that the situation is unpredictable, and that Yvan has a completely different style than his ominous predecessor. Told in five chapter headings, which accentuate a literary aspect of the film, Fontana is stingy with background information, assuming viewers already know their Argentinean history, building a macabre layer of unending dread and suspense through long, protracted scenes of dialogue, spoken with an eerie quiet, always out of range of others, establishing a suffocating air of secrecy, yet the overall feeling is that no one’s safe, as everyone’s a target. “They chase us like rabbits,” we are told. With exquisite cinematography by Gabriel Sandru and a moody, harpsichord-heavy musical theme by Paul Courlet that evolves into a synthesized sound, underscoring the flaring nerves of steel and chameleon-like façades that hide what’s going on under the surface, guided by the unscrupulous habits of Dekerman (Juan Pablo Geretto), an Iago-like lawyer lurking behind the scenes (perhaps a version of what he’ll become), with people, for whatever reason, wanting to get their money out of the country before it depreciates or gets stolen, quietly conveying a moral emptiness enveloped by a surrounding fear. Yet more than anything this film is about the accumulation of power. We learn from Inés that the film title is a banking code for “Be silent” and “Be careful what you say.” Among the more charming guests he meets is Magdalena Padel-Camón, Elli Medeiros, who appeared in the early Assayas film, Late August, Early September (Fin août, début septembre) (1998), seen sipping cocktails by the pool, reminiscing about her years of traveling through Europe, absolutely loving Geneva, suggesting it was Borges’ favorite city because it never changed, recalling Keys with fondness and affection, claiming he always took care of everything, knowing exactly what to do. For instance, they developed a habit of singing a song together as they approached the customs office at the airport, and they would laugh together, as he used to say, “Custom officers smell fear, just like dogs, but they don’t suspect happy people.” An urbane and sophisticated woman of the world who easily moves from Spanish to English to French, something the film also does with exquisite skill, as many of the Argentine characters are completely at home in French, she immediately takes to Inés like an old lost friend, yet Yvan remains at arm’s length, instead hanging out with her husband Augusto (Juan Trench), a broad-shouldered ex-military man of means who appears more at home in a bullfight, remaining tightlipped about his plans, not an easy man to cozy up to. He takes Yvan and his wife horseback riding on his estate, seen riding underneath a sumptuous avenue of trees that he likes to describe as “Les Grands Boulevards.” In his view, “This country has become a private hunting ground for some people at the top.” His daughter was engaged in political activity before she disappeared, leaving Augusto in emotional ruins, finally deciding he wants his money in safe hands, transported out of the country. To that end, Yvan has to pass a nondescript gym bag over to a trusted ally, which is done discreetly without detection. In such a male-dominant society, women are not always welcome, so some are turned off that he brought his wife, yet she’s his intellectual equal, perhaps even more demanding of him, firing off this harsh volley, “Your father was right, fear makes you mediocre,” which leaves him very little wiggle room to find his own path for success. “He surpasses me. He is irreplaceable,” he complains to his wife. “On the contrary, you’ll go where Keys never went,” she calmly reassures him like an emerging Lady Macbeth, demonstrating she is the mastermind behind the operation. Offering her own appraisal at the end of each day, like a report by a spy operative, she can read a room better than her more naïve husband, and can put people at ease, yet constantly has to explain to him what’s going on, heard confiding to a female client, “My husband and I are one and the same person. Him.”
Yvan even visits the former residence of Keys, still untouched since his mysterious absence, which he describes afterwards as a labyrinth, having to pass through many doors, but he does make a discovery, finding another name on the portfolio that is not on his list, as it includes the name of Lázaro. Among the more genuinely affecting moments are a classical guitarist, Alejo de los Reyes plays Estilo Pampeano (1924 Antonio Emilio Pascual Viudes) YouTube (3:48), while another is an abrupt scene change to a disco party, accentuating the blinding effects of a strobe light, a visual device that underscores, with dizzying effect, the everchanging face of the Argentine identity, remaining anonymous, constantly shifting, yet hidden and concealed out of sight. Nowhere is secrecy more attuned to a specific place than the Circle of Arms, a private club that was originally formed by the heads of the nation, specifically 78 men with a penchant for fighting duels, where a chilling conversation takes place underneath a historical painting depicting a battlefield of dead bodies strewn along the wayside, all lying near a pool of blood, which may be a Cándido López painting, After the Battle of Curupaytí, Después de la Batalla de Curupaytí López, Cándido. 1893, a key battle in the Paraguayan War. Directed to a private bar at the back of the club where bankers, men of the cloth, military officers, and selected politicians mingle, the atmosphere couldn’t be more sinister, none more menacing than Monsignor Tatoski (Pablo Torre Nilson), who informs him that “parasites must be eradicated.” He speaks in a fervent whisper, yet commands the screen, where his conversation is clearly the centerpiece of the film, as the Church is completely aligned with the Generals, literally thriving on the paranoia of the times, taking some perverse satisfaction in reminding him what Keys used to say, “Let’s be greedy when the others are prudent.” Money is the language of power, and in particularly dark times, he represents the privileged elite, offloading plenty of money, where the international banker, perhaps unknowingly, speaks his language. This scene draws in the entirety of Argentinean history into the equation, as this condition did not happen overnight, but represents a ruling elite with a history of genocide with the indigenous population, while also systematically erasing the black population as well, clearly the whitest country in South America (Blackout: How Argentina 'Eliminated' Africans From Its History ...), where in a country of 42 million people, 97% claim to be white. Even their national soccer team stands alone in the entirety of the southern hemisphere of the Americas as the only team with no black players. In much the same way, the nation has a way of eliminating all the “dirty money,” with Yvan finding himself in a position of laundering the blood money of a dictatorship, exactly as the mafia has been known to do. It’s a frontal assault of heightened tension, matched by stylish art direction, breathtakingly beautiful visuals, and a sense of foreboding, but nothing prepares us for the final chapter, literally entering Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness territory, slowly unearthing the trappings of neo-colonialism, with Yvan traveling upriver on a canoe to a secret destination in the heart of the jungle that can only be described as spooky, like a pirate adventure searching for buried treasure, and what he discovers is something like El Dorado, though it can have an extremely preposterous look about it, particularly when we find our protagonist wearing a tailored suit while carrying a briefcase through a machete-cleared hike through the jungle. One of the startling realizations is that there is a banking currency other than money, as the government seizes the property of rich and poor alike, transferring those collected assets into money as a way of reinforcing their hold on power. Yvan doesn’t even blink at what he discovers, which may be the hidden secret explaining the government formula for success, where perhaps Keyes got a little bit too greedy, yet now Yvan finds himself negotiating terms with a murderous dictatorship, all in a day’s work, refusing to ruffle any feathers, as the entire film has hinted at what happens when you do. Conducted under cover of secrecy, this effectively reveals how dictatorships remain in power, essentially surviving by casting a wave of fear throughout the country from a series of carefully calculated murders and unexplained disappearances, a scare tactic that allows them to plunder the nation at will, while the supposedly neutral Swiss, adopting the banking culture of knowing when to keep quiet, reward this behavior by actually offering lucrative backroom deals, basically allowing the military junta free reign, while also providing a veneer of respectability. This unsettling film noir portrait of the Swiss couldn’t be more damning, showing an indifference to the brutality displayed by the Videla government, perhaps showing a blueprint for the international banking conglomerates of today. Fontana, himself, has a small cameo role as a piano player, improbably playing the sappy Morris Albert song Feelings, Morris Albert - Feelings (1975) - YouTube (3:45), perhaps an homage to Charles Aznavour in Truffaut’s SHOOT THE PIANO PLAYER (1960).
