Don’t change a winning team! Juan José Campanella comes back along side Argentina’s favourite actors, Ricardo Darin and the beautiful Soledad Villamil, plus the Oscar winning cinematographer Felix Monti, for the 9th entry in our “10 Latin American Films to Watch Before You Die.”
In 2010 El Secreto de Sus Ojos received the highest accolade at the 82nd Academy Awards by winning Best Foreign Film (incidentally, Felix Monti was cinematographer on the only other Argentine film to win an Oscar). Named in BBC’s 100 Greatest Films of the 21st Century list, El Secreto de Sus Ojos was also re-made into a Hollywood blockbuster movie with Julia Roberts and Nicole Kidman, The Secret in their Eyes. The original is far superior.
The intriguing story takes place between two historically-significant decades in Argentine history, focusing on the relationship between judiciaries Benjamín Espósito (Darín) and Irene Hastings (Villamil) and their investigation into a rape and murder case in 1970s Argentina. The couple, obviously attracted to each other, meet again in the 1990s, when Benjamín appears again in Irene’s life, having been unable to move on from either the harrowing case, and their emotions, both unresolved.
The storyline, unpredictable and rich with symbolism, is brought to life through Campanella’s outstanding direction and screenplay based on Eduardo Sacheri's 2005 novel La pregunta de sus ojos, adorned with Darin’s and Villamil’s powerful performances and obvious on-screen chemistry, which is almost tangible and gifts the film an extra level of dramatic passion. (Film aficionados might remember Ricardo and Soledad having worked together, masterfully, in Campanella’s 1999’s 'El Mismo Amor, la Misma Lluvia' reviewed by LatinoLife here)
And so…Buenos Aires, 1999, not yet two decades have passed since the end of the dictatorship (1976-1983), when the Argentine government ‘disappeared’ 30,000 suspected subversives in the biggest human rights atrocity in its history. Benjamín Espósito (Darin), now a 60-something year old retired criminal court investigator, is recalling what had happened 25 years earlier, trying to make sense of a failed prosecution, trying to put his story into writing.
Buenos Aires, 1974 just two years before the far-right military coup, 40-something Espósito, begins an investigation into the brutal rape and subsequent murder of a young married woman, Liliana, supported in his quest by Pablo, his alcoholic colleague. The two get interrupted in the office by the introduction of Irene (Villamil), a beautiful, upper-class 20-something woman who has just graduated from Cornell University and has been appointed new Department Chief. In a moment of stillness and beauty, Benjamin looks at Irene and falls instantly in love her, a secret he is going to keep “behind his eyes” for 20 long years.
The gruesome details of Liliana’s murder, meanwhile, oblige Benjamin and Pablo to do anything in their power to find and convict the culprit. While Espósito finds a lead, however, Romano, Espósito's adversary, extracts a confession from two lower-class workers of committing the murder. This infuriates Espósito, after discovering that both of them were tortured in order to gain the confession and quickly close the case.
Meanwhile Benjamín’s own investigation (or rather an instinct he gets from a simple expression 'in the eyes' of someone in a photograph) leads him to Isidoro Gómez. When their ingenious probing lead Benjamín and Pablo spot him at a football match, Isidoro is brought in to be questioned, where Irene’s equally ingenious, if unorthodox, cross-examination extracts Gómez’s own confession, in an uncharacteristic emotional outburst from the psychopath.
Gómez, brilliantly played by Javier Godino, is then brought to trial and sentenced, only for Esposito’s rival, Romano, to arrange his release, in return for his services as a hit-man for the now installed military government on the hunt for subversives. There is a chilling scene when Irene and Benjamin happen to encounter the recently freed murderer, his sadistic brutality now being deploying as a member of the government's Triple A paramilitary force, armed with a shotgun and licenced to kill.
Meanwhile Benjamin has the harrowing task of informing the murder victim’s husband, Ricardo, that the man who murdered his wife will not be brought to justice, as he had promised.
Fast-forward to 1999 again and Benjamin and Irene, now a high-court judge, revisit the terrible unresolved crime, the killer that never was punished, their love never consummated, and then...one of the biggest twists in cinema reveals the culmination of a 25-year-old mystery in a way that few would dare imagine...
The Secret in their Eyes is multi-faceted and multi-layered, raising deep questions on a personal, political and social level, about life, death, love, class, morality and, above all, justice and what constitutes right and wrong. The ending is just as dramatic as the start and the film showcases various intense and obscure (sometimes very graphic) dimensions of a criminal mystery and psycho thriller that have been unusually, yet effectively, paired with a philosophical drama, all while intertwined with the tender nuances of unspoken love between the two protagonists.
The film ends with many question marks, as Benjamin finally finds the courage to confess his love to Irene. She smiles, the film ends. Will she reciprocate?
