Can One Forsake a Passion?

Rating: 9/10 (13 October 2010)

This psychophysiological thriller begins with the meeting, after many years, of Benjamin and Irene. She's a judge. He's a retired criminal investigator. They're a little too happy to see each other. Twenty-five years ago, when she was assistant to a judge and he was an investigator under her, they were caught up in a vicious case of rape and murder. Benjamin visited the crime scene, and the dead woman's body powerfully told of the crime's cruelty. Two workers were arrested and convicted. Benjamin was never positive of their guilt. Now he tells Irene that on his own time he wants to write about the case.
There's a revelation that comes that I felt caused the film to be overcooked, but regardless, slowly the emotional grandeur and tragedy of that aim become plainer after this begins an interesting backward-and-forward excursion through time, between Buenos Aires in the 1970s and the turn of the new millennium, which reintroduces both the crime and the unrequited sentiment that's lingered all these years between Irene and Benjamin. That's where their individual allure emerges. Actress Soledad Villamil is mature, strong, rational and probably cast for her eyes, as the film has masses of close-ups, and they're essential to hiding secrets. Playing Irene at ages 25 years apart, she's never too young or too old, but standing right there.
Ricardo Darin makes her admirable cohort as Benjamin. His rank was too low, his salary too little, her presence too self-possessed for him to believe the hints he must have known she was giving. He's one of those men on whom a beard seems preordained. There's a melancholy about him. He has never stopped thinking about the murder case, and we get the feeling---although the movie is oblique about this---that the investigation was mismanaged at the time owing to Argentina's contaminated right-wing politics.
Without being too open-faced about it, the film reconstructs the threads of two stories, the murder case and the fragmentary feelings between Benjamin and Irene. It's packed with lucid characters. There's fully drawn and effective comic relief Sandoval, played with a fine balance between gravity and lightheartedness by Guillermo Francella, is Benjamin's alcoholic assistant, rather sidekick, in the investigation, one of those drunks who may be bungling but is not hopeless. He and Benjamin, and all the legal-side workers, participate in the amusing ritual of referring to each other by fancy monikers. Morales is the husband of the dead woman, even now fanatically preoccupied with her death. Gomez has at all times been Benjamin's true suspect, and there is an astonishing scene featuring him in a soccer stadium that I have no clue how it could've been filmed, FX or not.
The camera is like an omniscient character. There are many wonderful shots in the film, like that which opens the film and is later repeated. Various scenes take place that'll be retold later, using the retelling as part of Benjamin's evidence in the solution of the crime. The shots that are repeated somehow take on a greater dramatic force.
Juan Jose Campanella is the writer-director, a gentleman who weaves a thorough (perhaps overly so), enthralling, adoringly constructed film, an epiphanic story where blinders are removed, suppressed desires are realized, self-limitations are accepted, the protagonist takes unusual actions, behaves oddly, anxious about the future. We get to fully know the characters, and the story details their complications and desires with fitting admiration. There is the continual feeling that they exist in the moment and not at some position along a predestined gamut. And though the film is a little bit overdone as I say, the cast doesn't act as much as it lives life candidly under invented circumstances.