a mediocre film of good ideas

Rating: 6/10 (19 September 2010)

This film is a bit like an empty pie: beautifully executed and still full of calories, the only thing it seems to be missing is a solid filling of a plot. Neither the detective story nor the love story in it make much sense and aren't really worth writing home about. If, however, we mute our internal critic for a while and try to believe the story, the film will unfold as something more than just a well-photographed flaw. Essentially, "The secret in their eyes" is a fable about coping with unresolved past - and, no less importantly, about whether such coping on its own provides enough nourishment for creativity.
Some time in the middle of his career, Benjamín Esposito, a legal counselor, encounters a rape/murder case that he cannot resolve. The reasons for this are hardly convincing, but let's say this is mainly due to the powers that be as well as his own hotheadedness. This case haunts him so much that he befriends the husband of the victim - Ricardo Morales, a somewhat unimaginative banker, who would go to the train station each morning trying to trace the murder suspect. Esposito is very empathic to Morales's suffering, almost unnaturally so. He is horrified that Morales's life from now on is going to be a life sentence, with nothing else happening. Morales is indeed in a very bad way at the beginning, but at some point we're left wondering whether he copes with the events better than Esposito himself. There's also an unresolved (and very unconvincingly presented) love story between Esposito and his young upper-middle class boss Irene that happens at the same time, which leaves both of them scarred.
It is 25 years later and Esposito, now retired, is still trying to reconcile with the past. His take on this is now is to try writing a novel about the case. In his pursuits he revisits Morales and Irene, who both seem... no, not to have moved on, but rather to have found a positive way to get on with their lives. Only Esposito dwells on the past. To make the things worse, his writing isn't going well, friends find it too dry - as if notes to a novel rather than the novel itself.
It is only when Esposito discovers what exactly Morales has done (and is doing) to be able to look ahead rather than "serve a life sentence" that he realizes he needs to stop pondering the past and act. The actions required are on a considerably smaller scale, but they seem to do the job. We don't even need to care whether his novel was a success in the end. That courage is a necessary ingredient for both happiness and creativity is the message that the film delivers much more sincerely than the particulars of the plot itself.