Elefante Blanco

Rituals of Performance: Ricardo Darín as Father Julián in Elefante blanco Beatriz Urraca Revista de Estudios Hispánicos, Tomo XLVIII, Número 2, Junio 2014, pp. 353-372 (Article) Published by Washington University in St. Louis DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/rvs.2014.0031 For additional information about this article https://muse.jhu.edu/article/548212 Access provided by University of Washington @ Seattle (8 Jan 2017 05:25 GMT) Shortened Title 353 BEATRIZ URRACA Rituals of Performance: Ricardo Darín as Father Julián in Elefante blanco El actor argentino Ricardo Darín es indiscutiblemente la cara más conocida del cine de su país. Su personalidad pública es un retrato compuesto por elementos intrafílmicos y extrafílmicos, y se caracteriza principalmente por presentarse como una imagen del argentino medio, del hombre de la calle que opina sobre los problemas sociales de su país, interpelando directamente al poder político desde tribunas mediáticas controvertidas. Este artículo analiza cómo estos factores contribuyen a dar forma al papel del Padre Julián en Elefante blanco (Pablo Trapero, 2012) y cómo, a su vez, la marca de celebridad creada por Darín in- teractúa con la figura histórica del Padre Carlos Mugica y con el trabajo de los curas villeros en las villas de emergencia que la película describe. Al igual que el sacerdote a quien representa en la película, el actor habita el espacio entre lo ordinario y lo excepcional, entre la vida privada cotidiana y la actuación como figura pública. Dada la casi total ausencia de estudios sobre el estrellato y el trabajo actoral en el cine latinoamericano, este artículo se apoya en textos teóricos referentes a Hollywood, complementándolos con entrevistas con Darín y estudios sociológicos y periodísticos sobre el trabajo de los curas villeros en Argentina. ˙ ˙ ˙ ˙ ˙ Celebrity is kind of a currency that goes beyond wealth. It really is leverage. —Johnson (20) In May 2012, there was hardly a surface on Argentine city streets that was not plastered with the face of Ricardo Darín, the country’s most recognizable and beloved actor, wearing a clerical collar, his familiar blue eyes gazing pensively into the distance on advertisements for Elefante blanco (Dir. Pablo Trapero 2012). Flanked by smaller im- ages of his co-stars, the Belgian actor Jérémie Renier and Trapero’s spouse Martina Gusman, Darín’s oversized figure even dwarfs the ruins of the building that gives the film its title—a massive unfinished Revista de Estudios Hispánicos 48 (2014) 354 Beatriz Urraca structure that looms over the villa—leaving no doubt as to the nature of the box office draw. This ubiquitous poster is not a still image from the film, but a composite photograph in the style of what film historian and theorist Charles Wolfe has described as a “celebrity photo which feeds off—and provokes—interest in the career” of the actor (97). The special prominence given to Darín in publicity materials has the effect of slightly distorting the narrative by conditioning the viewer’s expec- tations. A close watching of the film reveals that co-star Renier’s role is just as central to the plot and is in fact the driving force behind the crucial changes and events in the story. Furthermore, it is the Belgian actor who commands the screen in the film’s most riveting scenes, while the Argentine star’s presence is significantly reduced, especially during the second half. So what makes Darín’s role so forceful and prominent? How does the actor’s celebrity contribute to that perception of prominence? In what ways do the kind of character he plays in Elefante blanco and the film’s theme enhance it? And to what extent is the film’s framing of the actor reshaped by the media stories that surrounded its opening and by Darín’s extrafilmic performance as a cultural activist? This article will explore these questions to elucidate how Darín’s on- and off-screen (extra)ordinariness shapes his role as Father Julián. To understand the complexities that arise from this interaction of intra- and extrafilmic factors, I rely on two kinds of sources. First, interviews with the actor as well as theoretical studies of stardom help examine how Darín’s par- ticular brand of celebrity generated public interest in the film and built up a larger awareness of the social issues it depicts among middle-class audiences. Second, sociological and journalistic texts about the work of curas villeros in Argentina illuminate the analysis of Darín’s character, a priest who, like the actor, inhabits the space between ordinariness and exceptionality, between everyday life and performance. Elefante blanco was undisputedly the most successful Argentine film of 2012. It opened to packed houses, and after only two months had been seen by over 700,000 people in Argentina, far surpassing all other local productions. In a country where directors routinely struggle for audiences and exhibition venues, it played in most multi- screen shopping-center movie theaters in major cities. Many Argentine middle-class viewers felt compelled to pay to see a local film. It pre- miered at the prestigious San Sebastián and Cannes film festivals, and as an Argentine and Spanish co-production, received rave reviews in Ricardo Darín as Father Julián in Elefante blanco 355 the Argentine and Spanish mainstream media. The Buenos Aires daily Clarín called it “una de las películas más taquilleras de este año,” while Spain’s RTVE acclaimed it as “el fenómeno cinematográfico del año” in Argentina (“Elefante blanco se acerca al medio millón de espectadores”; Ramón). Elefante blanco narrates the events that follow the arrival in a Buenos Aires villa of Nicolas (Renier), a young Belgian priest whom Father Julián (Darín), a seasoned cura villero, rescues after a massacre in the Amazonian jungle. Nicolas is coming to Argentina to heal his physi- cal and mental wounds, but since Julián suffers from a fatal medical condition (revealed in the film’s opening scene), he finds himself being trained as his mentor’s successor at the head of the parish. Wracked by survivor’s guilt after the massacre, Nicolas quickly becomes immersed in the social work of a neighborhood marred by the violence of rival drug gangs. He also gets embroiled in labor conflicts resulting from Julián’s major project: the conversion into housing of the “white el- ephant” building, a hulking structure designed in 1937 to be the largest hospital in Latin America but whose construction has been paralyzed and abandoned by every government since. Julián is deeply involved in the social reality of his inhospitable environment, rolling up his sleeves to perform many tasks that go beyond his pastoral duties. He is especially concerned with the rehabilitation of youths addicted to paco, or coca paste, and with providing his parishioners with decent housing. Nicolas’s unorthodox methods, which include a dangerous escapade into drug-gang territory and a sexual liaison with Luciana (Gusman), a social worker, clash with Julián’s leadership style and tragically endanger his precarious edifice of boundaries, challenging his trust in his mentee right up to the dramatic conclusion. Because of the social concerns it addresses, Elefante blanco in- spired media stories that suddenly seemed to have discovered the real villas de emergencia where the film takes place. This interest may be very recent, but shantytowns similar to the ones shown in the film have long been there, lying extremely close to the Buenos Aires centers of power and wealth, and they are numerous, large, and overpopulated.1 Many journalists explicitly sought to elicit Darín’s personal views about the slums based on his experiences filming there, an opportunity the actor did not squander. For example, he confessed that he would be satisfied if the film“genera un movimiento de sensibilización” (Castro). He 356 Beatriz Urraca also declared that “es imposible no quedar transformado . porque la desigualdad de oportunidades . es tan perversa” (Garrido). These interviews in which the actor self-consciously uses his stardom to draw attention to a social problem form a corpus of extrafilmic texts which is inseparable from the film itself and essential to understand both its success and Darín’s role in attracting audiences. As film scholar Richard Dyer has argued, these types of texts are an integral part of the star’s image and create a “rhetoric of sincerity or authenticity, two qualities greatly prized in stars because they guarantee, respectively, that the star really means what he or she says, and that the star really is what she or he appears to be” (Heavenly 11).2 In the case of Elefante blanco the rhetoric of sincerity involves a combination of Darín as the star actor and Trapero as a star direc- tor with a reputation built on socially conscious dramas. He is one of a handful of directors from the founding cohort of the New Argen- tine Cinema to have thrived in his transition to commercial features. A brief look a his career reveals that most of his films feature male protagonists battling personal demons as they struggle against—and become enmeshed in—some of Argentina’s most pressing social and economic problems. Starting out as an independent filmmaker with his depiction of the economic crisis and unemployment in Mundo Grúa (1999) and the institutional corruption of the Buenos Aires provincial police force in El bonaerense (2002), his work soon evolved into more mainstream features, some of which have brought about actual social change. For example, in depicting the sordid conditions prevailing in Argentine women’s jails, Leonera (2008) reopened the debate on whether young children belonged there, and in 2009 Congress passed a law that provides house imprisonment as an alternative for pregnant women and mothers of young children.

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