PRIME CUTS

The Precarious Luck of the Unholy Fool David Corbett open the door. Instead, he raises the volume wooded haven in northern Patagonia, south- on his portable CD player: the “Sinfonia alla west of Buenos Aires on the Chilean border. e know this man. Rustica” by Vivaldi. Esteban refuses. He has no taste for Not well. No one The next day he delivers the fox to a killing animals. He merely stuffs them. knows him well. museum of natural history, where he encoun- When he returns home, he finds the apart- No one takes him ters an associate named Sontag. As the two ment empty. His wife’s belongings are gone, seriously, either. This wait in line at the administration office to her closets bare. He sits on their bed, star- is the point, nar- cash their checks, Esteban, in elaborate detail ing straight ahead with a look of bemused rativelyW speaking. The archetype is that of (the scene is acted out before our eyes as he distraction that will seldom leave him the fool, the marginal man, often innocent, describes it) recounts how the place could be throughout the film. always overlooked. robbed without a shot being fired. People die He calls Sontag, and makes the fateful In this particular incarnation he’s an epi- in robberies, he says, because criminals are decision to go along on the hunting trip. leptic named Esteban (though his name is so often stupid. He would do it differently. With all the better hotels in Bariloche full never spoken in the film). We first encounter Sontag mocks him. This man who has of tourists who’ve come for the final week- him in darkness, to the sound of a nagging never even held a gun thinks he’s a criminal end of the local casino, Sontag and Esteban electronic chug and beep. He’s had a sei- mastermind. Sontag, as though to goad Este- are forced to decamp to a hunting lodge in zure in an ATM kiosk. As the image fades ban into a cowardly refusal, invites him to go the middle of nowhere. This misfortune only in we watch him regaining consciousness, hunting the next day in Bariloche, a heavily exacerbates tensions—insults are exchanged sprawled on the floor, bills scattered every- where. He struggles to his feet, collects his cash and debit card—delivering us, at last, from the peevish alarm and the whirr of his card being spat out, retrieved, spat out, retrieved— then stumbles off into the night. Next we learn he is a taxidermist, and watch him meticulously fit the skin and fur to a stuffed fox, sewing it neatly in place. The choice of eyes is key. They foreshadow those of a dog we’ll encounter later in the story. The dog will be the one and only char- acter with an honest claim to knowing who Esteban is. That claim cannot be made by his wife. She pounds on the frosted glass door of Este- ban’s office as he applies the finishing touches to the eerily lifelike but lifeless fox. She’s try- ing to talk to her husband through the door, pounding on the glass, visible only in blurred silhouette, her voice rising in anger, in pas- sionate frustration. He does not go to her, or Ricardo Darín gives a masterful performance as a bookish taxidermist who ends up living out his fantasies

filmnoirfoundation.org I SUMMER 2015 I NOIR CITY 81 in the woods, with Sontag continuing to mock Esteban for his squeamish unwilling- ness to shoot. “You don’t know me,” Esteban responds, and calls out Sontag for beating his wife. The two men angrily part. Alone in the woods, Esteban stalks an impressive stag but in the blurred confusion of tracking the animal’s movements through the trees he ends up shooting a man instead. The man’s name, we’ll discover, is Dietrich. He owns the hunting lodge where Esteban is staying, but more importantly he’s the mastermind of a dubious heist, a robbery of the casino closing that weekend. Esteban, as Estaban is surprised when his newfound freedom transforms him from a pup into an alpha dog though caught in the current of a dream, will assume Dietrich’s place in the crime. (Meet John Doe, Matador). themselves. His innocence serves as a kind of But before that plan unfolds, Esteban suf- The contest typically reduces to innocence magic. Coincidence—which is to say luck— fers a seizure in the woods, which is signaled versus experience, which often manifests itself is his angel. by what is known as “the aura”—a suspen- as outsider idealism versus insider cor- It’s the bumbling-toward-victory story sion of time in which the world shimmers: ruption. The fool routinely triumphs not arc that often lends the form its comic tone. sights, sounds, and smells intensify to an through courage, skill, or wisdom but by How odd, then, to see this approach in noir, almost exquisite degree. unwittingly allowing his enemies to outfox the genre least inclined to cut its hero an Esteban will later describe this moment as even break. The genre where luck is always one of total freedom, because ironically there the enemy. (There are those who might argue is nothing he can do. And we’re introduced Esteban wanders that noir, a thematic cousin to black comedy, to the film’s central metaphor—the puzzling moment-to-moment, is indeed not a tragic form but a comic one. liberty only to be found in the surrender to But we’ll leave that for another essay.) fate. Or its less pretentious stand-in: luck. inching forward like a It’s a tribute to the craft of El Aura’s man on a high-wire, incredibly gifted but sadly short-lived writer The fool as hero has a long history and director, Fabián Bielinsky, that he was in storytelling, dating back at least to Aristo- each step charged with able to turn the Fool as Hero trope into a phanes. The character has numerous mani- noir vehicle without lapsing—intentionally festations: the enchanted idiot (Being There, an incandescence that or unintentionally—into laughs. Forrest Gump), the unwitting impersonator renders even good There are indeed elements of El Aura that (The Prince and the Pauper, Dave), the are quite funny. The star, Ricardo Darín— plucky idealist (Mr. Smith Goes to Washing- fortune perilous. for my money one of the two or three great- ton, Legally Blonde), the naïf out his depth est film actors in the world today— possesses an unrivaled knack for deadpan humor. His face—stubbled and soft-chinned, all but for- gettable except for the radiant, heavy-lidded blue eyes—possesses the arresting homeli- ness of Bogart’s face, disarming any impulse to look away. But by pacing the film so slowly, so methodically, with a deliberate patience that has all but disappeared from Hollywood filmmaking, Bielinsky avoided the comic pit- fall, and gave the film the dark grace the best of noir always possesses. Esteban wanders moment-to-moment, inching forward like a man on a high-wire, each step charged with an incandescence that renders even good fortune perilous. Therein lies this particular fool’s magic. Even when he catches a whiff of luck, danger is never more than the next uneasy step away. “The Dog” (portrayed by female “Eva”): one of the most enigmatic canines in the history of cinema As in all stories of this type, the fool is

82 NOIR CITY I SUMMER 2015 I filmnoirfoundation.org Hollywood blockbuster. He considered the role as written hopelessly clichéd. In a con- ference call, one of the producers pleaded, “Is it the money? We can get you more money.” Darín responded that his father had been a Socialist, and he lived his life honestly and decently. When he died his worldly pos- sessions barely filled a steamer trunk. The man’s example had a profound effect, and Darín tried to live up to it in his own work. This prompted a momentary silence on the phone line, after which the producer chimed in once again: “Is it the money? We can get you more money.”

In Experimental Latin American Cinema: History and Aesthetics, Cynthia Tompkins, a professor of Latin American Studies at Arizona State and a proponent of Deleuzian film theory (don’t ask me, I just work here), subjects El Aura to a sympathetic if somewhat tortured analysis given what she presumes to be the formulaic requirements of noir. (If I understand her right, Scarlet Darín on location with the late writer-director Fabián Bielinsky Street forms the template to which all other films in the genre slavishly conform, even pitted against savvy insiders who marvel the ranks of Argentina’s guild-like cinema if they don’t. She doesn’t come out and say at the sheep who’s blundered into the wolf system, he served for years as assistant direc- that, of course, but …) pack. Given the crime milieu, this means tor on numerous projects before finally, in Fortunately, artists tend to be more will- Esteban finds himself scheming with gang- 2000, getting the chance to direct his first ing to break rules than sanctify them, which sters: the pitiless Soto, who serves as ham- full-length film, the internationally acclaimed accounts for the low-grade snarl whenever mer, and the aging and infirm Montero, who Nueve reinas (Nine Queens). A comic crime they sense an academic nearby. Though acts, at least for a while, as voice of reason caper set in Buenos Aires, this film revealed himself a product of an educational system and sympathetic heavy. It’s among these men a unique style, indebted but not enslaved to that tended to elevate theory over technique, Esteban is offered the chance to prove his noir, with a deft command of pacing, char- Fabián Bielinsky recognized the importance theory: no one needs to get hurt, as long as acter, and the blindsiding plot twist, all of of story as well as style. His films bear up you’re not stupid. which would return in his second, more under any frame-by-frame analysis but he The crime progresses, like Esteban’s pre- somber feature, El Aura, a film he reportedly was no slave to the image. seizure episodes, as a kind of shimmering had been planning for years. It’s this embrace of story on one hand, suspension of time, a fated dance beyond Both projects featured the same lead and on the other the willingness to turn the the reach of will or choice, peppered by actor, Ricardo Darín, who has become some- trope of the Fool as Hero on its head, that eerie misfortune, charmed but not redeemed thing of an icon for Argentinian film, playing reveals Bielinsky as both innovator and emu- by luck. everything from a radical priest to the par- lator. I’ve watched El Aura at least five times Oh, and there’s the dog. Who sees, and ent of a transgender teen to a shopkeeper now, and expect to watch it at least five more. understands. But of course cannot speak. who befriends a Chinaman who falls from Once the film starts I feel a bit like Esteban, the sky. In the noir vein, he not only starred trapped in this shimmering moment, free in As noted earlier, Fabián Bielinsky as the egotistical con man Marcos in Nueve my lack of freedom, suddenly aware of every died young. He suffered a heart attack in a reinas but also as the ambulance-chasing sight and sound. hotel room in Sao Paulo, Brazil, at age 47, “vulture” Sosa in Pablo Trapero’s Carancho. And then there’s the dog. The dog is having made only two films—both arguably He gained particular notice for the role of sheer genius. ■ masterpieces. the lovelorn investigator Benjamin Esposito A member of the first generation of in El secreto de sus ojos (The Secret in their graduates from Argentina’s film schools, Eyes), which won the 2010 Oscar for Best David Corbett is the acclaimed Edgar he differentiated himself from many of his Foreign Film. Award-nominated author of the novels The countrymen by finding inspiration not in One of my favorite anecdotes concern- Devil’s Redhead, Done for a Dime, Blood of Europe but Hollywood, with an avowed ing Darín emerged during an interview in Paradise, and Do They Know I’m Running? fondness for both Hitchcock and Mamet. which he explained why he turned down His latest, from Thomas & Mercer, is The Typical of those obliged to rise through a chance to play a Mexican drug lord in a Mercy of the Night.

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