Too much going on here: a murder mystery with politics, comedy, and romance

Rating: 8/10 (6 May 2010)

This Argentinian film has many virtues but some serious flaws. Ultimately it winds up being too much of a muchness. Its meandering story line focuses on a murder investigation that spans 25 years. It's carried out by a judicial underling, Benjamin Esposito (film veteran Ricardo DarÃ­n, who starred in both of the late FabiÃ¡n Bielinsky's films) with his (romanticized) alcoholic assistant Pablo Sandoval (the comic Guillermo Francella). Meanwhile the lowly Esposito is (wanly) in love with his judicial boss, the aristocratic Irene MenÃ©ndez Hastings (Soledad Villamil), who arrives with the imprimatur of a US Ivy League education, and eventually becomes a judge.
'Eyes' feels a bit like 'Zodiac,' only in Spanish and with too many flashbacks, too much unconvincing aging make-up, a last reel that feels like a trailer, and a saccharine conclusion. Everything is complicated by the corruption of the PerÃ³n dictatorship and its aftermath under PerÃ³n's widow Isabel, because it all begins in the mid 1970's. This is interesting and there might have been more of it it. The repressive regime could have been, but isn't, made to explain everything, the homemade justice, the delayed romance, even Pablo's drunkenness. Disorder and evil might well have been more emphatically shown as contaminating all aspects of life, as they clearly are in the superbly creepy 2008 Pablo Larrain film, 'Tony Manero,' about a petty criminal and John Travolta imitator in PInochet's Chile, vintage 1978.
Seen from the viewpoint of flashbacks, because the film begins in the 1990's when Esposito reflects back on earlier events, a young man's beautiful bride, Lilliana Morales (Carla Quevedo), is brutally raped and murdered; we see her only as a Grand Guignol tableau draped over a bed. The husband Ricardo Morales (the stiff Pablo Rago), a bank employee, never gets over it. Something is fishy from the start, when a rival judicial agent tries to pin the deed on a couple of dark-skinned immigrant workers, whom he beats into confessing. How do Esposito and Sandoval know who really is the guy? From the angle of his eyes in an old picture: it seems like something gets lost in translation at this point. Anyway, when the murderer, Isidoro GÃ³mez (the subtly creepy Javier Godino) is tracked down -- and this is when things get lively, with a buoyant, almost Hitchcockian chase and capture in a soccer stadium -- and is dramatically made to confess by Hastings through impugning his manhood -- also a very good scene -- he's released right away because he works for the dictatorship's death squad so "what he does in his private life doesn't matter." All this is being reviewed 25 years later when Hastings and Esposito, who've long been separated, meet again and he shows her a "novel" he's trying to write based on the murder investigation and his involvement in it. So the film, based on a novel by Eduardo Sacheri, is a murder mystery, a love story, a story about memory, a political study, and a buddy picture with comic overtones.
The latter may be its best aspect. The film is never more Argentinian or more charming than in its scenes in funky but historic-looking cafÃ©s full of seedy characters in front of tasty plates of hors d'oeuvres, everything drenched in sunlight and shadow, where Esposito goes to brood, or to retrieve Sandoval from one of his drunks. The interiors of houses are cozy and atmospheric too. If only some of the funkiness had been allowed to creep into the scenes around the court and law offices, but they are, doubtless by intent, kept coldly grand and marmoreal. Still, all the staging is ambitious and assured. There is something cozy in the way the story keeps doubling back over itself as well.
But Campanella may be a bit too sure of himself, because in time, over the film's 127-minute length, all the leisurely doubling-back, which seemed to suggest a magisterial, almost epic structure, begins to drain away the energy that has fed into the story from the hints of evil, the widower's determination to find the killer, and the comradely investigations of Esposito and Sandoval. You could have built a whole movie out of Sandoval. Unfortunately he doesn't make it through to the end of the picture. Campanella manages to juggle so many balls successfully for a while, but then the murder mystery falters and the makeup starts to show (overly emphasized by a preponderance of tight closeups). A creepy final revelation is followed too hard upon by a late-blooming romance. The romance is the weakest element in the story, too lukewarm and repressed most of the time (understandably, due in part to the social gap between Esposito and Hastings), and its most energetic moment, also its corniest, seems to be only a fantasy. Maybe Eduardo Sacheri makes it all work better in his novel. 'El segreto de sus ojos' has a few very fine scenes and much impeccable acting but the narrative contains kitsch elements that undercut the too limited depiction of the moral and political world of the time that the narratively less ambitious 'Tony Manero' manages so well for 1970's Chile. The film nonetheless won the Goya best picture award in Spain, and soon afterward received the Oscar for Best Foreign picture. But for all its ambition, it's not as successful as Jacques Audiard's 'A Prophet,' which it beat out for the Hollywood award.