The richest articulation yet of Campanella’s restrained visual wit and uniquely humanist aesthetic, and one of the few genuinely sensitive thrillers ever made.
At even a cursory glance, Juan José Campanella seems the odd man out in Argentina’s current roster of internationally-known directors. If Lucrecia Martel limns fractured psychologies of caste-obsessed ferocity and Lisandro Alonso views the filial and economic handicaps of his homeland with glacial optimism, Juan José Campanella envisions society as a gnarled web of ensnaring, and enduring, relationships — some symbiotic, most hopelessly perverse, but none emblematic of class anxiety, per se. To parse it more prosaically: Campanella shoots mere love stories, with far more attentiveness to the first word than the second, and his films do not so much follow plots as they erect narrative frameworks for the trafficking and unraveling of sprawling human connections.
The Secret in their Eyes is thus bound to be dismissed by a handful of critics and sophisticated moviegoers as sterile celluloid — it was safe enough, after all, to beat both the brutal folklore of The White Ribbon and the intergenerational angst of The Milk of Sorrow and snag an Oscar — despite it being the richest articulation yet of Campanella’s restrained visual wit and uniquely humanist aesthetic, as well as one of the few genuinely sensitive thrillers ever made. Ostensibly a justice-themed picture (the main characters are federal investigators attempting to solve a horrific rape-murder) with a cleverly wrangled socio-political capper, the film is more accurately described as a time-lapse depiction of flowering intimacy and, in its most off-kilter pairing, co-dependency. And though the creative configuration of the finale provides a strangely unquestioned alternative to the controversy of capital punishment, what’s more rewarding is how Campanella’s micro-community facilitates cosmic justice through its diverse constellation of personalities, affinities, and transgressions.
Adapted from a popular Argentine crime novel, the film clings to the detective genre throughout while roving other, less-ossified tropes. The retired investigator protagonist, Benjamin (played by Campanella regular Ricardo Darín) is attempting to write a memoir of a hauntingly unsolved case; he asks his ex-chief Irene (Soledad Villamil) to assist him in teasing out both forgotten factoids and, hopefully, clues towards a solution still out of reach. Campanella thus marks the boundaries for two parallel journeys of emotional discovery — that of the fate of the young woman’s killer and that of Benjamin’s feelings for Irene — both of which occur within Benjamin’s head and on the pages he obsessively types away to stave off senescent ennui and long-harbored professional guilt.
Whether or not an intentional distancing mechanism, the subjective filter of Benjamin’s thoughts — as he tautologically puts it, his memoir is confused with both memories and “memories of memories” — conveniently allows Campanella’s tendency towards mannered lyricism to appear a diegetic necessity. When we see the murder shakily played out, it’s Benjamin’s speculative reality, just as we understand the film’s sun-dipped flashbacks to the doomed investigation as jagged portraits stitched together meticulously from vintage remembrance. The in medias res opener, which carves a painful train station valediction from the film’s center and blurs crucial details (faces, bodies, structures) for us to retrieve later in the running time, is in many ways a granular analogy for Campanella’s structural premise, and for crime-solving in general: as ideas, events, and characters amass definition, they prove to contain ever more befuddling multitudes.
This also allows us to perceive occasional blemishes in the film’s storytelling as indicators of the narrator’s, rather than the filmmaker’s, social myopia. Campanella’s scripts, though rife with hard-earned, genuine emotion, are often excitedly untidy, occasionally sprinting towards angular resonance (such as when two lovers in El mismo amor, la misma lluvia tenderly hold hands through iron prison bars during a night spent mistakenly incarcerated) and at other moments lapsing into saccharine dialogue or plot-propelling contrivance. One conspicuously flat yet crucial interrogation scene in The Secret in their Eyes threatens to terminally disturb the otherwise organic metamorphosis Benjamin and Irene undergo as co-workers and friends, and while one can assume the political saturation of the film’s third act is drawn directly from the source material, we feel Campanella’s perspicacity sagging under the weight of shifting regimes and flourishes of caricaturized fascism. But throughout, Campanella’s directorial emphasis favors the relationships deepening under his dramatic stewardship; all of the crucial turns in Campanella’s story are more significant for the closeness between bodies they reveal then for their contributions to the MacGuffin of a mystery at the film’s foundation.
Without the desultory baroqueness and irresistible authenticity of these relationships, The Secret in their Eyes would be a floppy, liberal-minded exercise in justice interrupted; but under their gestation the political content seems piquantly real, save for a few misguided expository scenes. Even in instances where Benjamin breaks from standard investigation protocol in eye-rollingly cliché ways, Campanella fashions the sequences as a tense litmus for male camaraderie: Like “bad” cops, he and his soused partner Sandoval (Argentine comedian Guillermo Francella) break into their main suspect’s home and pilfer letters from his senile mother’s panty drawer, but emerge with a mutual understanding of the judicial puissance their trust engenders.
The incisiveness with which Campanella renders the dynamics of human duos is not always so benign, however. In its most daring layer, The Secret in their Eyes could even be interpreted as a love story between a murderer and a man his actions have widowed: in the par-baked “twist” of an ending, these two have recognized the immutability of their cohesion with sobriety as devoted as the giddiness with which Benjamin and Irene revive their decades-old, flirty attraction. And what’s far more memorable than the topical commentary sprouting at the surface of these couplings is how Campanella observes, and underscores, his characters’ entrapment — he frames them frozen between throngs of blurry bodies, or smushed up against one another in fearful doorways, or cowering in elevators occupied by gun-toting grudge-holders, or torturously locked in private, isolating chambers with books and files and folders looming about Edgar Poe-esquely. The salient moral is that social webs will eventually victimize everyone — adhering to and exploring like-minded nodes is one of the few ways to survive. (Or to succeed, as is shown in one lengthy continuous shot, seamlessly catenated from aerial and handheld footage, depicting the fumbling apprehension of a prime suspect at a soccer tournament). While we’re navigating the unfathomable, sometimes the only useful compass is how well others understand us.
