Brilliant and intense

Rating: 9/10 (25 April 2010)

Is justice only a legal term or a spiritual ideal? Many seek justice but confuse it with revenge or being right and live their lives in turmoil as both victim and victimizer. Benjamin Esposito (Ricardo Darin), a retired Buenos Aires state criminal investigator, knows that even though a case that has been haunting him for the last twenty years is closed, it is still incomplete for him and justice in his mind has not been served. Based on the novel by Eduardo Sacheri and written by the director, Juan Jose Campanella's The Secret in Their Eyes (El Secreto in sus Ojos), Academy Award winner for Best Foreign Language Film, is a noir'ish thriller that is the most popular film in Argentina today, having broken every box office record in that country.
Like multi-faceted films of the fifties and sixties, The Secret in Their Eyes is a murder mystery and psychological thriller, a lighthearted love story, a meditation on memory, and a look at justice in Argentina in the 1970s that does not hesitate to show the indignities people suffered during the military junta, though not in a heavy handed way. As the film opens, the retired Esposito decides to write a novel about the 1974 rape and murder of an attractive 23-year old woman, young newlywed Liliana Coloto (Carla Quevedo), a case that was closed by the authorities but never solved to his satisfaction. To obtain access to the file on the unsolved rape-murder case he spent so much time on, Esposito pays a visit to Irene Menendez Hastings (Soledad Villamil), his former supervisor and chief supporter who is now a judge.
It is clear from their meeting that they have rekindled an attraction from years past that faltered on class and social differences (she got a law degree from Cornell) and remained strictly professional. Supported by the cinematography of Felix Monti and the engaging score by Federico Jusid and Emilio Kauderer, the film moves back and forth between the present and the past. As the camera picks up the case in 1974, Campanella chooses to graphically display young Liliana's bloody and battered body (a very poor choice) laying half on the bed and half on the floor. Benjamin interviews the victim's husband, Ricardo Morales (Pablo Raga), but he is not a suspect. In fact, the investigator is impressed by the depth of the love that Morales had for his deceased wife and the impact his loss has had on him.
Although two workmen of dark skin color from a nearby building are arrested and charged with the crime, Esposito knows they are innocent and were coerced to confess in an example of the Junta's racist justice and they are soon released. When he goes through old photographs of Morales' wife, however, he notices a strange young man, Isidoro Gomez (Javier Godino), gazing intently at her in every photo. The "secret in his eyes" suggests that he may be a prime suspect and Esposito and his clownish partner Sandoval (Guillermo Francella) try to track him down against the direct orders of their judicial boss. Sandoval, a penetrating student of human nature though an alcoholic, goes through Gomez' letters to his mother trying to find out what his "passion" is and finds that he is a devoted soccer fan.
In one of the film's highlights, Esposito and Sandoval locate him (among 90,000 screaming fans) and a seven-minute chase scene takes place in one unbroken shot through the stadium as the camera sweeps through the crowds, follows a few false leads, then goes into overdrive when Gomez is spotted. Under interrogation by Ms. Hastings, the suspect cracks when, using every inch of her power as a woman, his physical stature is ridiculed by the Supervisor to try and provoke him. When Esposito tells Morales of Gomez' confession, both men agree that justice will be served only if Gomez is given life in prison but corruption gets the upper hand, at least temporarily. Performances by both leads are brilliant and intense and many twists and turns await the viewer as The Secret in their Eyes ratchets up the tension in the last half hour to arrive at a surprising and Hitchcock-like conclusion. It is one of the best films of 2010 so far.