BEGINNING TO FORGET
by Douglas Messerli
Juan José Campanella and Eduardo Sacheri (screenplay, based
on a novel by Eduardo Sacheri), Juan José Campanella (director) El secreto de sus ojos
(The Secret in Their Eyes) / 2009, USA in 2010
Winner of the 2010 Oscar for the
Best Foreign Language Film, Argentine director Juan José Campanella's film is a
smart mix of contemporary detective story, love story, and political mystery,
all combined with a bit of film noirish
style, which makes it highly appealing, if not a great event in the cinema.
Benjamín Esposito (Ricardo Darín), a former police detective, determined
to write a novel on an old, closed case of twenty-five years before, returns to
the public offices of his former superior, Irene Menéndez-Hastings to ask her
permission for him to reopen the records of that brutal event. I don't know
what secret the title is referring to regarding their eyes, but it is clear the
moment the two reencounter one another that Benjamín has been in love—and remains
in love—with the head-detective, emotions clearly intertwined with the case
itself.
The murder of a beautiful young woman, Liliana Coloto, was, we are to
understand, a shocking event in Argentinean culture. What we gradually come to
comprehend, however, is that it is not the murder itself perhaps that has so
shocked everyone—for Campanella photographs the corpse almost as if he were
shooting a painted manikin, removing the viewer from any visceral emotion—but
the events surrounding the murder, which echo throughout the culture for months
after the investigation has begun.
No sooner have Esposito and his perpetual drunken partner, Pablo
Sandoval (Guillermo Francella) intuited that the murderer is not an iterant
Chilean who his friend who the Head Prosecutor has quickly rounded up to solve
the mystery, than the case is closed. Illegally, Esposito and Sandoval track
down a former boyfriend of the dead woman, ultimately proving that he has
committed the act.
Yet even as they prove his guilt, the Prosecutor, out of revenge and
because his own criminally political motivations, frees the killer, Isidoro
Gómez, using him as a goon to murder and punish political enemies. The case,
positioned in the period of Argentine dictator Jorge Rafael Videla's horrific
reign of terror, is only a reflection of the insanity of the period, when
hundreds of men and women opposed to or even thought to be questioning the
government where conveniently murdered, dropped from airplanes or secretly
tortured to death. It is perhaps that secret
horror to which the film points, not to the hidden love between its two major
figures.
What we learn eventually, in a film that perhaps has too many twists and
turns to permit plausibility, is that the man who most suffers from this
murder—despite the fact that the series of events also leads in Sandoval's
death—is the young victim's husband, only recently married to her at the time
of her murder.
Ricardo Morales seems throughout as the sort of perfect griever, a man
who cannot escape the realities that changed his life, but yet seeks no violent
revenge, only justice—a near-impossible demand in the society in which he
exists. For Morales, however, it is not the larger picture that matters, but
the cessation of daily life; the movie begins, in fact, with a voice over
describing precisely his position:
On June 21st, 1974, Ricardo Morales
had breakfast with Liliano Coloto for
the last time. For the rest of his
life he'd remember every single detail of
that morning. Planning their first
vacation... Drinking tea with lemon for his
nagging cough...with his usual lump
and a half of sugar. The fresh berry jam
he'd never taste again. The flowers
printed on her nightgown...and especially,
her smile. That smile like the
sunrise...blending in with the sunlight on her
left cheek.
By the middle of the film, however, when questioned by Esposito, Morales
suggests that the worst thing about the shell of life is that he is
"beginning to forget," is unable to remember certain experiences with
and images of his wife.
In Esposito's desire to write about this past, we realize that the two
men are in similar positions. The detective himself is trying to recover
something, the loss of an intense experience of his life, his rejection of the
woman he has loved when he leaves the city to save himself from Sandoval's
fate. As Morales has warned him, however, "If you keep going over the
past, you're going to end up with a thousand pasts and no future."
Morales should know. For what Esposito finally uncovers is that Morales
has himself joined the living dead of Argentine society. After intense
questioning by Esposito, he admits to having killed his wife's murderer, that
he, too, has become a wanted man.
Yet both the detective and the audience perceive that there is something
wrong about this admission of guilt. How has the man who admitted to have a
"life full of nothing" suddenly come to have a life full of
something, if only this guilt?
Upon leaving, Esposito turns back, observing Morales from afar. What he
discovers is as horrifying in some ways as the original act. Morales has
imprisoned the murderer Gómez, locking him away in a barn, feeding him, keeping
him alive—but in total solitariness, in a world of utter silence. When Gómez
discovers Esposito as witness, his plea is not that he help him to escape, but
to make Morales speak to him. It is love that he has wanted, of course, that
has brought him to such hate in the first place, the reason he had killed. And
it is that love stolen from him that has turned Morales, as well, into a mad
man—a man, like Gómez, with no future, a ghost.
Fortunately Esposito can "turn back," and correct his error by
returning to life. He faces Irene, unafraid for the first time in his life of
"complications."
Irene Menéndez Hastings:
It'll be complicated.
Benjamín Esposito: I don't
care.
Irene Menéndez Hastings:
Shut the door.
Los Angeles, November 8, 2010
Reprinted from Nth
Position [England] (November 2010) and Reading
Films: My International Cinema (Los Angeles: Green Integer, 2012).
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