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

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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 tra- bajo 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.

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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 coun- try’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 promi- nence? 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 espe- cially 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. As a direct result of his depic- tion of the unscrupulous exploitation perpetrated by ambulance chasers in Carancho (2010), the anti-carancho law was enacted one year later to protect accident victims from unethical lawyers. In casting Darín for the central role of Elefante blanco, Trapero sought to capitalize on the actor’s well-known philanthropic endeavors and on his no-nonsense denunciations of injustice in order to draw attention to the ever- growing social problem of the Buenos Aires villas. The government has once again paid attention: though Elefante blanco has recently been de- clared “de interés social y cultural” by the Buenos Aires legislature it is Ricardo Darín as Father Julián in Elefante blanco 357 too soon to know if it will bring about any significant change for these deprived neighborhoods.3 The sudden media interest in real-life slums, however, may well be due more to Darín’s and Trapero’s national and international reputations than to the topics of urban poverty and the work of curas villeros explored in the film. A case in point is Ezio Massa’s independent filmVilla (2008, 2013). Despite opening in the wake of the success of Elefante blanco and addressing similar issues, it went largely unnoticed.4 Both are entertaining action-packed portrayals of slums, shot on loca- tion, and both share a compelling common theme, an actor, and, for a time, even a title.5 For both directors, the goal is raising awareness of the poverty that prevails in the Buenos Aires slums among middle- class movie-going audiences that are often warned to stay away from those areas, and both address the huge scale of the problem and the relatively low impact of individual efforts to solve it. Yet only Elefante blanco, with its sizable marketing budget, its choice of seasoned actors, its compelling scenario, and its epic soundtrack by Michael Nyman produced sizable results at the box office. The combination of these factors undoubtedly contributed to the success of Trapero’s film, but given Darín’s centrality in the marketing materials, I will restrict my comments to casting, stardom, and the social issues stemming from the nature of his role. The scale of Darín’s national and transnational celebrity is rare in Latin America; as John King has noted, perhaps only the Mexican actor Gael García Bernal enjoys a similar status (2003). Both men are unique in their combination of a commitment to progressive politics and an ability to draw audiences anywhere in Latin America, Spain, and increasingly in other countries as well. Darín has not delved directly into politics like Arnold Schwarzenegger, Charlton Heston, or Clint Eastwood, nor has he engaged in the rising trend among Hollywood mega-stars like Matt Damon, George Clooney, Brad Pitt, or Angelina Jolie to travel through disaster-stricken areas of the Third World to raise consciousness about the plight of the dispossessed. Known as “celebrity activism” or “commodity activism,” this trend encourages participation “in social activism by buying something,” be it a product, a donation, or a ticket to an entertainment show (Banet-Weiser and Mukherjee 1). Though Darín has put his celebrity to work with a number of philan- thropic organizations, he has thus far avoided being identified with a 358 Beatriz Urraca single issue, and all his activities have targeted humanitarian or envi- ronmental problems that directly affect his own country. For example, he has participated in several Greenpeace campaigns to save native lands in the provinces of Salta and Chaco, lent his voice and image to announcements designed to fight gender violence and discrimination against people with disabilities in Argentina, and made phone calls for Red Solidaria, an Argentine network that connects people in urgent need with those who can help. For these and other activities, he was awarded the Save the Children prize in 2012. However, it is Darín’s open criticism of social inequalities and political inefficacies in the media that gets the public’s attention and works seamlessly alongside his choice of a project like Elefante blanco, which blurs the boundaries between entertainment and social critique. A series of his recent media appearances has become something like a film in itself, more compelling than Jolie’s and Clooney’s African so- journs because each time he touches a raw nerve in Argentine society. Though seemingly spontaneous, these media events appear to be follow- ing the tongue-in-cheek advice of Hollywood writer and producer Rob Long, who urges celebrities to “[t]hink of [themselves] as an interna- tional brand” and to view their activism issues as if they were films with plot twists, posters, costars, and locations (74). As Kevin Fox Gotham argues in his discussion of Pitt’s campaign to rebuild New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina,

Celebrity activism can dramatize social issues, and expand and rein- force openings and possibilities for actors to use commodified symbols and spectacular imagery for positive and progressive ends, including launching radical critique that exposes the reality of inequality and the deprivations of social policy. (98)

None of the philanthropic campaigns in which Darín has officially participated have accomplished this radical critique as much as his off- the-cuff comments to the media in the wake of the spectacular nature of Argentine urban poverty in Elefante blanco. Treating interviews that ostensibly begin by praising his acting work as a soapbox, Darín has used his celebrity status of late to voice political opinions that are wel- comed by many in Argentina’s deeply divided society, and open-letter responses to his comments have almost become a genre. His on-screen role as a priest immersed in one of Buenos Aires’s most impoverished Ricardo Darín as Father Julián in Elefante blanco 359 slums recently prompted him to use his increased credibility to speak about social inequalities, and made headlines when he questioned the origins of President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner and her late husband’s (former President Néstor Kirchner) personal wealth in an interview for Brando magazine. When Darín speaks, people listen, and even the President felt compelled to respond (“Cristina le respondió”).6 Darín’s engagement in social issues through these interven- tions positions him as the creator of an authoritative public discourse grounded solely in the authenticity of his public persona. This is a clear case of what film scholars Philip Drake and Michael Higgins have termed “celebritization of politics,” when they argue that “celebrities perform a public service in bringing politics to an audience that tra- ditionally feels excluded from political discourse” (99). Playing on his popular guy-next-door persona, Darín emphasized that he wants to give voice to regular folks, “gente honesta, honorable, trabajadora y decente que hay en este país, que normalmente no imprime y no aparece en la tapa de ningún diario” (Sahores). More recently, Darín’s comments once again revolutionized the social media when he questioned the Holly- wood star system as lacking substance and value. In an interview for an Argentine television channel, he justified his refusal to work with Tony Scott on the film Man on Fire (2004) as the stunned host wondered why he would turn down an opportunity to earn more money: “Yo soy todo lo feliz que puedo ser sin mirar para otro lado . . . vivo en una situación privilegiada. . . ¿Qué más querés? ¿Para qué más?” (Fantino). The video was replayed more than 240,000 times on YouTube in less than two months as fans clearly identified with a celebrity for whom the values of family, work, and personal integrity are more important than money and fame (“¿Por qué Ricardo Darín…?”). It is precisely that guy-next-door persona that defines Darín’s particular kind of celebrity, affording him credibility both on and off screen. According to Paul McDonald, an actor’s stardom is a “brand” whose “function is to create certain perceptions about products” (78). Much like Tom Hanks was “hired for Saving Private Ryan to not only play a particular dramatic role but to also provide a prism through which the film could be viewed,” Trapero invokes a particular set of meanings associated with Darín when casting him for his role in Ele- fante blanco (78). Among them is his vast popularity in Argentina and abroad, deployed in the enormous prominence devoted to him in the film’s promotional materials, and his aura of accessibility. In some of his 360 Beatriz Urraca most recent films, Darín defies the status quo and runs up against some of Argentina’s most entrenched powers, for instance in Carancho and the Oscar-winning El secreto de sus ojos (Juan José Campanella, 2009). This alignment between some of his film projects and his sociopolitical leanings is also in tune with that of his Hollywood counterparts:

In the roles they play both on and off screen, stars can serve as role models, potentially spurring activism and political engagement. Stra- tegically harnessing the role model status, many Hollywood philan- thropists, in fact, directly align their artistic and cultural output with the causes they support. . . . Such an alignment neatly satisfies the star’s necessary negotiation of public and private personae and yet also potentially and problematically blurs the line between altruism, self- promotion, and self-preservation. (Trope 155–56)

In Elefante blanco, Darín personifies a modern-day incarnation of the cura villero Carlos Mugica, to whose memory the film is dedicated. The actor fleshes out a humble priest whose mission is nothing less than to transform the enormity of the slum’s suffering, swimming against the current of the insurmountable obstacles posed by political, economic, and ecclesiastical organizations.7 Already a legend in his own time, Mugica’s presence permeates Elefante blanco through his likeness, his words, and popular ritualistic demonstrations of enduring devotion to his memory. Julián’s tragic, violent death at the end of Elefante blanco as a result of the drug war depicted in the film echoes not only Mugica’s murder but also posits a challenge to Darín’s popularity as the protago- nist who almost always wins a victory for the common man. Performing as Father Julián, Darín imbues his character with the aura of his own stardom, adding his personal charisma to that of Mugica to portray an ordinary man who is undergoing a deep per- sonal crisis, but who is also endowed with nearly superhuman powers when it comes to confronting collective ills. Richard Dyer’s reflections on stardom help expose “the extreme ambiguity/contradiction . . . concerning the stars-as-ordinary [sic] and the star-as-special” that lies at the heart of both Darín’s brand of celebrity and of Julián/Mugica’s charisma (Stars 49). The identification of the actor with his character— and, by extension, with Mugica—hinges on fusing the “middle-class fellow in crisis” he perfected in earlier films with the larger-than-life priest who, like Mugica, “combines the spectacular with the everyday, Ricardo Darín as Father Julián in Elefante blanco 361 the special with the ordinary” (39).8 Darín’s interfilmic and extracin- ematic personae rest precisely on his talking, behaving, and acting like an ordinary man. This trademark ordinariness that makes Darín special is a concept that also applies to many curas villeros, whose leadership style is grounded in their eschewal of material goods in order to live in the same conditions as their impoverished parishioners. Yet hyperbolic adjectives like “superhuman” and “exceptional,” which inevitably dis- tinguish any celebrity of Darín’s stature, also invoke the almost saintly Mugica as well as Julián as men who take on massive social problems in real life and on screen, respectively. In the violent 1970s, Mugica’s “option for the poor” proposed a concept of the priesthood that hinged on renouncing the comforts enjoyed by many Catholic priests and con- fronting poverty from the inside.9 In the volatile sociopolitical climate and increasing poverty that characterize present-day Argentina, Darín exposes social injustices in the media, while his character Julián combats them onscreen, evoking Mugica. Playing the role of a cura villero enhances the issue of Darín’s particular brand of stardom in Elefante blanco. Here he must inhabit the skin of a character who is, like him, simultaneously a performer and a man who strives to be like everyone else around him. But we must not forget that the priesthood involves a marked element of performance: when addressing a congregation and celebrating the sacraments, the priest is clad in colorful ceremonial robes and his speech is punctu- ated by ritualistic phrases, tones, and gestures. This is duly reflected in several scenes depicting Catholic rites in the film, in which both Darín and Renier come across as stilted. But in the case of real-life curas villeros, the priesthood is also characterized by the choice of a simple, modest lifestyle in line with the way many people live in the villa. This is staged in Elefante blanco through the shabby, leaky apartment Julián shares with Nicolas and another priest, Lisandro (Mauricio Minetti), with its lack of private spaces and its constant electric outages. Scenes shot inside the apartment, located inside the “white elephant” building where other dwellings for the community are projected, often show the priests performing mundane domestic tasks, much more at ease with themselves and with each other than they seem in front of the parishioners. Julián is both one more member of the community and one of its leaders, he suffers like everybody else and yet people look to him for solutions to every problem—a double role that echoes Darín’s guy-next-door brand of celebrity. 362 Beatriz Urraca

In fact, the cinematography of Elefante blanco is key in its deliv- ery of a complex and at times contradictory character by allowing Darín to exhibit his trademark “guy-next-door charisma” in combination with the more spectacular aspects of his performance.10 The introductory se- quence, which shows Julián undergoing a CAT scan, sets up this expec- tation by playing with unusual image sizes and camera angles. A static camera records Darín’s head sliding toward the center of the screen from above, his face inverted in an extreme close-up that barely fits in the frame. The white paper gown that envelops the rest of his body borders the top of the screen, isolating the huge face, promptly covered with a mask of white mesh, which is then removed after the scan is completed. This sequence reveals an ordinary man undergoing a medical procedure, visibly concerned about his health, but is also designed to invite the viewer to scrutinize the actor’s face upside down. The unfamiliar angle and the duration of the shot, along with the framing of the face amid a very white, sterile environment, allows not only the chance to read emotions—the typical function of a close-up—but also the time to resituate Darín within the new character, to peel off some of the actor’s masks (those characters he played in previous films and which are so inevitably evoked at the start of each new performance), and to prepare the viewer for the larger-than-life qualities with which Elefante blanco imbues the character of Julián.11 The CAT scan machine—itself a huge, sophisticated imaging device—acts as a double of the cinematographer’s camera and reinforces the expectation of probing, examination, and exploration of the priest’s inner life, an expectation which the film un- fortunately does not fulfill. Julián is also the only character in Darín’s repertoire whose clothing clearly differentiates him from the everyman protagonist on whom he has built his acting reputation. In fact, the wardrobe, par- ticularly the white collar he wears in nearly every scene, marks him as a priest and has protective qualities, as Nicolas finds out on his first day in the villa when he is asked to don it lest the drug dealers mistake him for a narc. In most scenes, the collar is paired with gray shirts and faded blue jeans, clothes that make Julián blend with the urban grit, with the cement structure behind the villa, and with the gray skies that oppressively dominate the film’s ambiance. It is when he wears a white alb and brightly colored stoles that Julián stands out against the rest of the characters and against the oppressive poverty of the villa. The Ricardo Darín as Father Julián in Elefante blanco 363 alb allows him to signify purity and saintliness but also leadership and centrality, especially in the spectacular scene that depicts the celebration of the anniversary of Mugica’s death. Up to this point, the figure of Mugica has loomed large in the film. The enormous mural of his image glimpsed on the chapel wall may be recognizable only to initiated Argentine audiences, since the name below the portrait is partially obscured, revealing only the words “Padre Carlos.” But now the cinematography and the tools of the mise-en-scène come together to showcase the spectacle of religious ceremony and Julián’s stature in a scene that marks the beginning of his own process of becoming an icon. Devout parishioners parade poster- sized black-and-white photographs of Mugica through the streets of the villa. They depict a clear-eyed man with a slightly furrowed brow gazing upward into the distance. His expression is reminiscent of the one Che Guevara wears in his iconic picture by Alberto Korda and also recalls the expression Darín himself wears in the film’s promotional materials, an upward gaze that suggests the subject’s thoughts are far away from the present time and place. The gaze also evokes the figure of a fallen hero and the enduring power of his image and his ideas.12 After the parade, Julián steps up to the altar to address the crowd gathered in Villa 31 and pronounces Mugica’s words: “Ustedes saben que aquellos a quienes consideramos nuestros gobernantes dominan a las naciones como si fueran sus dueños.” The medium shot of Darín makes his face appear the same size as Mugica’s. Later, as the film nears its end, the celebration of Julián’s life with a similar march led by Nicolas and cries of “¡Viva el Padre Julián!” and “¡Justicia para el Padre Julián!” recreates many elements of this scene and highlights the heroic nature of Darín’s character even after his death. These two scenes overplay the theatricality of the priest’s func- tions, building up the image and dominance of the film’s hero. In them, the alb worn by Julián and the other priests and deacons figures very prominently, providing a stark contrast with the rest of the mise- en-scène. Its bright whiteness echoes both the film’s title and the CAT scan mask of the initial scene, two instances in which the color white suggests disease and decay. Whiteness is also utilized in the form of gauzes and meshes that partially veil Julián’s face during some of his more ministerial scenes: when he visits Nicolas in the jungle hospital, for example, or during his first mass in the chapel. Taken together, the 364 Beatriz Urraca scenes in which this color predominates contextualize Darín’s character as primarily performative and suggest that beneath the costume lies a more complex and less saintly man than appears on the surface. These white devices lend him an aura of purity and spirituality while suggest- ing that there is more to this character than meets the eye. However, the revelation of what may lie beneath Julián’s outward appearance is never quite probed beyond one outburst in which he confesses his weariness and anger to Nicolas. Though it has been compared toDes hommes et des dieux (Xavier Beauvois, 2010), Elefante blanco emphasizes the ritualistic aspects of the priesthood at the expense of the deeper, better- developed representation of spirituality evident in Beauvois’s film.13 This may be due to Trapero’s and Darín’s self-avowed lack of faith (Ramón) but also to the generic constraints of the classical action or police drama, unconventional as the hero may be in this case, which privilege action over words and feelings. In line with the emphasis on Julián as a man of action, the efforts of the church in the villa are depicted in the film as more material than spiritual, more social work than evangeliza- tion, more performance than reflective introspection: hands-on tasks like painting, cleaning up, construction, and drug rehabilitation are punctuated by brief ceremonial demonstrations of faith and a mise-en- scène—particularly in the priests’ apartment—replete with candles and religious statues. The synergy between the mise-en-scène and Darín’s character is complemented by the two other priest characters in Elefante blanco. Despite standing out as the lead character and an unquestionable community leader played by a star actor, Julián cannot be understood in isolation from the more emotional Nicolas or the more practical Lisandro, or from the choice of actors to play these roles: one a famous international movie star in his own right and the other a little-known theater actor-director without much experience in the cinema. On the one hand, much like the film’s three major shooting locations represent an attempt to present a generic villa rather than one in particular, the three priests provide a composite portrait of the cura villero as a type within whom an expectation of selflessness collides with personal traumas and desires. On the other, the relationship among the three is unequal, for the bond between Julián and Nicolas is privileged at the expense of Lisandro, who is never developed as a full-fledged character. Male bonding in the Julián-Nicolas dyad is complicated by the mix of admiration, competition, and transgression that the younger man Ricardo Darín as Father Julián in Elefante blanco 365 brings to the relationship, all of which contribute to magnifying Julián’s image. Nicolas intimates his desire for Julián, and his desire to be like Julián, when he confesses to Luciana, “Lo seguí. Lo escuché.” But soon the film devolves into a nuanced power struggle in which the death of the more fatherly figure in the pair seems like a foregone conclusion. As a foreigner with blond hair and a French accent, Nicolas’s lack of understanding of the rules of the villa leads him to transgression, which imperils the credibility of the other two priests’ work, and to reckless- ness, which puts human lives in jeopardy. Transgression is exemplified by the steamy sexual relationship he initiates with Luciana; recklessness characterizes one of the film’s most riveting scenes, when Nicolas refuses to wait for Julián’s approval before venturing deep into a gang’s turf at the heart of the villa to recover the corpse of a drug lord’s relative. This action sets off a series of events that will culminate with his mentor’s death. Thus Trapero emphasizes the importance of action over words through his portrayal of the slum priests, a feature that is especially salient in Julián’s charac- terization. The first seven minutes of the film, which include his CAT scan and his trip to the Amazon in search for Nicolas, have no dialogue at all. At the jungle hospital, Julián only says, “Nicolas, c’est moi” be- fore going another seven minutes without uttering a word. This way of setting up the scene and the characters is typical of Trapero’s style: in many of his films, the director allows the viewer to transition slowly into the fictional world through a carefully orchestrated series of images accompanied only by music and, at times, silence. Nicolas explicitly ad- dresses the leanness of the film’s dialogue when he shares his experience of spending an entire year in silence in a monastery: “Después de un tiempo así, pensás muy bien cada palabra antes de hablar.” Sparse as it is, much of Julián’s dialogue relies on the declama- tory delivery of prayers scripted by the liturgy of the Catholic Church or phrases by Mugica, shunning the more free-form styles that char- acterize the speech of many real-life curas villeros. The street-wise slang evident in Darín’s most stellar performances—Nueve reinas (Fabián Bielinsky, 2000) being a prime example—as well as in his off-screen persona, is also absent here. In a nod to the nature of the priesthood, whose members are considered representatives of Christ on Earth, parts of the script deliberately seek to characterize Julián as an archetype, a good man who can be replaced by another good man wearing the same 366 Beatriz Urraca clothes, repeating the same phrases, and reenacting the same rituals. This does indeed happen when Nicolas celebrates mass in an identical setting filmed from the same angle as an earlier scene featuring Julián, or when he sits on Julián’s chair in the final shot, but it is at odds with the nature of the character as the successor of a legend and a martyr in his own right. Julián’s actions, on the other hand, speak volumes about what makes him almost superhuman. The problems he tackles are as colossal as the “white elephant” building is massive. Despite his illness, doubts, and exhaustion, he braves the Amazonian jungle on his own to save Nicolas, barely breaks a sweat as he bails water from the canoe with a cup, climbs to the top of the building to lift a semi-conscious youth out of the rubble in his arms, and single-handedly breaks up a street fight between drug-addled teenagers. Darín’s presence especially captures the viewer’s gaze as he spreads his arms wide to separate police in riot gear from angry demonstrators. Alone, Julián can face almost anything, but the Church proves an obstacle rather than assistance, and words become his only way to express frustration at the lack of action of the hierarchy. When his own community is destabilized as a result of Nicolas’s maverick escapades, he can do little but declare that “acá el pá- rroco soy yo.” The ineffectual bureaucracy represented by the apathetic bishop who reminds him that he works “dentro de una estructura” produces a similar reaction: “Andá de nuevo. Sos el obispo, hacete oír.” Although many of Julián’s lines, as the above examples dem- onstrate, are scripted to avoid revealing any depth of character or spirituality, they break the mold in the scene when he confesses his exhaustion to Nicolas: “Estoy cansado. Muy cansado. A veces tengo ganas de mandar a todos a la mierda . . . Estoy lleno de ira. Estoy cada día más enojado. Tengo miedo. No quiero terminar odiando a todo el mundo.” Otherwise, Julián faces his illness, his burnout, and his anger crying and praying alone at the candlelit altar in his apartment. He comes across as a dark, brooding character who smiles only once in the entire film (when a new priest is ordained) and whose face, often filmed in chiaroscuro, conveys isolation and introspection amid the oppressive environment created by the crumbling buildings and relentless rain. These scenes recall the way Darín was also framed in Carancho and El secreto de sus ojos, with a hangdog expression that belies the possible defeat of an insurmountable task. As the film progresses, Julián’s deterioration can be read not only as physical decline or a result of the stresses of running a parish in Ricardo Darín as Father Julián in Elefante blanco 367 an area of extreme poverty, but also as a re-evaluation of the traditional nature of the priesthood as an occupation. Trapero’s films often explore how Argentina’s harsh economic realities reshape the world of men at work, provoking crises as the parameters of the job shift and the hierar- chy within which they work is revealed as obstructive and even unethi- cal. Julián may be the only protagonist of heroic proportions thus far in his oeuvre, but in his isolation as a slum priest confronting the massive, unalterable power structure of the Church, he has a lot in common with Rulo’s inability to handle the exploitative construction company in the director’s debut filmMundo grúa (1999), el Zapa’s personal and physical defeat at the hands of the corrupt police in El bonaerense (2002), or Sosa’s failed struggles to escape the Mafia-like Foundation in Carancho. To the trials these men face in the day-to-day routines of their jobs, Elefante blanco adds the interdiction against sex that looms over the lives of Catholic priests. By having Nicolas, whose foreignness marks him as the antithesis of Julián, transgress in his relationship with Luciana, the topic can be raised while maintaining the hero’s aura of purity and saintliness. In Elefante blanco, Darín gives life to a character that shares some of the characteristics of his own public persona. In his study of how audiences perceive film characters, Leo Braudy asserts that “[t]he wise director . . . uses casting to create meaning inarticulately” (207). This phrase describes the effects of Pablo Trapero’s re-teaming with Ricardo Darín for Elefante blanco shortly after working with him in Carancho. In casting Darín as Julián, the director deploys the full spec- trum of the star actor’s particular brand of stardom (the ordinary man as charismatic celebrity) to flesh out a character within which the con- tradictions inherent in that brand come to the forefront. As Argentina’s most famous male movie star, he plays the role of a cura villero who is, in turn, re-playing some of the words and actions of the founder of this group of priests. Julián’s becoming an icon toward the end of the film is the result of his own martyrdom, and is depicted in a scene de- signed to enhance and magnify his image as the villa’s own homespun celebrity. On the other hand, Darín’s brand of stardom, and the clash between the exceptional and the humble aspects of Julián’s character, play well with an ending where the priest reveals himself to be, in Leo Braudy’s words, “the normal person who finds himself capable of murder” (225–26). As Hugo Vezzetti has argued, this almost unbeliev- able sequence recalls “[l]a muerte del mártir o la muerte del guerrero” 368 Beatriz Urraca and “dos configuraciones diferentes y a la vez emparentadas de la vida ofrendada y del triunfo último, la superioridad final y definitiva sobre los enemigos moralmente inferiores.” Julián’s final act of violence— more performance than everyday life—is more consistent with the action genre than with the tenets by which the curas villeros live but is, as Vezzetti suggests, not entirely unrelated to the still unresolved issues surrounding Mugica’s death. The success of Elefante blanco has bolstered Darín’s career even further: he was nominated for Best Actor by the Academia de las Artes y Ciencias Cinematográficas de la Argentina for his role in this film. In the short time since completing it, he has starred in Tesis sobre un homicidio (Dir. Hernán Goldfrid 2013) and the Spanish-Argentine co-production Séptimo (Dir. Patxi Amezcua 2013). He also features prominently in two films made up of short stories: the Spanish pro- duction Una pistola en cada mano (Dir. Cesc Gay 2012) and Damián Szifrón’s forthcoming Relatos salvajes. These roles, and the rave reviews emerging about them, continue to validate Darín as a popular leading man and a box office draw in Argentina and abroad.

Widener University

NOTES

* I thank Gary M. Kramer and Carolina Rocha for their generous comments. This essay is based on a brief review of Elefante blanco co-written with Gary M. Kramer (Urraca and Kramer 8–11).

1 Villa 21–24 Barracas, for example, lies a mere three miles from the Congress build- ing. The 2010 census put the population of the Buenos Airesvillas at 162,000 people (Gallotta; Heguy), which represents a growth of 52.3% since 2001 (Bermúdez).

2 The importance of extrafilmic material for the study of stardom is widely recognized among film scholars. Su Holmes and Sean Redmond frame the concept of stardom as “the product of an interaction between on- and offscreen construction, a dialogue between the performing presence and the ‘private’ life of the star” (10). For Barry King, the star is “a persona that is both interfilmic and extracinematic,” and their “image on screen is already contextualised by the circulation of biographical and per- sonal anecdotal materials that frame their appearances on and off-screen” (“Stardom” 8; “Articulating” 40). David P. Marshall argues that “[t]o make sense of a celebrity, then, is not simply a study of the primary text . . . but rather the magazine profiles, Ricardo Darín as Father Julián in Elefante blanco 369

the television interviews, the presentation of premieres, the many unplanned photos and stories about the celebrity’s personal lives that populate the mediascape” (9–10).

3 “De interés social y cultural” is an expression commonly used by the Buenos Aires legislature and the Argentine media.

4 Villa was completed in 2008 and was screened at several small festivals, but only secured a commercial release in Argentina in early 2013, reaching less than 2,000 spectators in its first two months. Through the character of Father Tito, who makes it his mission to rescue children from a life of drugs, Villa pays an understated homage to Father José María “Pepe” Di Paola, a high-profile priest who worked in Villa 21–24 Barracas for fifteen years and rallied around the making of Massa’s film, along with numerous neighbors hired as actors and crew.

5 “Villa” was, for a time, Trapero’s working title for Elefante blanco. There are other similarities, for example: in Villa, Father Tito is compared to a tiny bandage on the overwhelming poverty that surrounds the Argentine capital; he is addressed by the diminutive curita, meaning “little father” but also “band-aid.” Similarly, Julián’s ef- fectiveness in solving the villa’s problems ultimately proves negligible, as the “white elephant” project is once again paralyzed at the end of the film and the ensuing riots leave several people dead, including himself. In addition, one of the protagonists of Villa, Julio Zarza, has a brief appearance as Father Danilo in Trapero’s film. After the completion of Villa, Zarza, who grew up in the slums, continued pursuing his then budding acting career and became involved in managing Mundo Villa, a multimedia company that seeks to tell stories that break stereotypes about the villas of Buenos Aires. His participation in Elefante blanco is unsurprising, but it should be noted that Massa’s film was a turning point in Zarza’s life which resulted in his becoming one of Argentina’s foremost referents for cinematic representations of the slums.

6 Similarly, in a controversial New Year’s Day 2013 radio interview with the outspo- ken anti-Kirchner journalist Jorge Lanata, Darín questioned the INCAA’s method of granting subsidies. This prompted its president, government appointee Liliana Mazure, to detail how the Institute functions in her lengthy remarks addressed to him and published in the online journal Haciendo Cine (Sahores).

7 Mugica, the martyred founder of the Cristo Obrero chapel, located in what is known today as Villa 31, was gunned down on May 11, 1974 by mysterious assailants believed to belong to the Triple A (Alianza Anticomunista Argentina).

8 The phrase “middle-class fellow in crisis” is Clara Garavelli’s.

9 “Option for the poor,” sometimes called “preferential option for the poor,” is a widely- used expression by Catholic social movements in Latin America.

10 The expression “guy-next-door-charisma” is Clara Garavelli’s. 370 Beatriz Urraca

11 The inverted image also prefigures death. This angle will be used again twice more in the film: once to show the corpse of Cruz, an undercover policeman, in his casket, and again to reveal Julián’s body after the shooting that ends his life.

12 The special significance of Mugica’s likeness, distributed during a similar celebration of the anniversary of his death to many different chapels along with pieces of the cloth- ing he wore when he was killed, is discussed in detail in Premat (2010, Chapter 3).

13 “City of God meets Of Gods and Men” is a phrase used in some promotional materials for Elefante blanco by Wild Bunch, which distributed both Beauvois’s and Trapero’s films.

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Palabras clave: Ricardo Darín, Pablo Trapero, Elefante blanco, Carlos Mugica, estre- llato.

Fecha de recepción: 1 octubre 2013 Fecha de aceptación: 18 diciembre 2013