September 14, 2010: Carancho
Continuing at the Toronto International Film Festival, my next film was Carancho, an Argentinian film about corruption in the emergency medical services and automotive insurance business. This was a tense thriller and the best film I saw at the festival this year.
Ricardo Darín is presumably not the star of every Argentinian film, though he was also in The Secret in Their Eyes, which won the Best Foreign-Language Film Oscar this past year. I was happy to see him again, with his face and particularly his eyes conveying a combination of fierce toughness and intelligence but also sadness and pain. Here he plays a lawyer who has been out for himself for so long that he’s blindsided by falling desperately in love with the idea of caring about someone else again. Whether he cares for this actual woman he falls for or just the idea of her is something that doesn’t really occur to him, but the woman struggles with it throughout the film. Not without her own flaws, this doctor who subjects herself to the ambulance graveyard shift is obviously compensating for some kind of guilt, which becomes clearer as the film moves on. As they both try to escape the powerful and corrupt systems in which they operate, they try at the same time to find a way fir their relationship to work for both of them, but it may not be possible. In the end, the powerful forces of evil manage to effectively win by ensuring the status quo.
There’s criminal intrigue here, a stylized but believable romance, and the fictionalized examination of a very real problem. Carancho is a nicely constructed and tense thriller providing plenty to think about. It’s a winner for me.
Film festival lives up to expectations.
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