This Argentinian movie based on a novel by Eduardo Sacheri, won the 2010 Academy Award for Best Foreign Film. It’s interesting on multiple fronts. Director Juan Jose Campanella says in his commentary the love story is predominant, and the plot only moves the story along. I can go along with that. An overarching theme certainly gripped me though: the difficulty and possible impossibility of letting go of past harms until we have resolved them, at least in our minds.
And so, the movie’s protagonist, a recently retired court clerk’s deputy, whose job in that judicial system includes investigative duties, writes a novel in order to bring closure to an unresolved rape and murder case. The discoveries are intricately intertwined with the unfolding love story. Moreover, they reveal the truth of the premise that we cannot leave behind the past until we have made peace with it.
I can’t help wanting to think of this movie as allegorical, too, because the writer or director slipped in some footage of Eva Peron becoming Argentina’s leader. Perhaps that was only to signal time passing in the exposition of the crime and investigation. But another layer of this complicated film—the unsavory politics of judges and adminstrators—at the very least pointed to a dire need for political reform. The judicial system within which the two lovers were working, one of them notes, did not provide justice, it provided a type of justice. And that, you will find out if you watch this thought-provoking movie, is what its story delivers.
