Monday, April 2, 2012

Flick of The Day: El Bonaerense / Buenos Aires

A couple of weeks back we reviewed the most recent film from Argentine director Pablo Trapero, Carancho a journey to the dark side of modern Buenos Aires. Today's flick of the day is another Trapero film, 2002's El Bonaerense. A critical hit on its release, it is a grim look at police corruption through the eyes of a young recruit to the Buenos Aires police force.
Zapa, played with a taciturn air of solitude by Jorge Roman, is a locksmith in a sleepy rural town in Argentina. One day he is sent by his boss Polaco to open a safe that has become jammed. An unsuspecting Zapa quickly has his quiet existence turned upside down when it turns out his boss has set him up for a robbery and he is soon behind bars. Fortunately or unfortunately depending on your point of view, Zapa's uncle is an ex-cop and he manages to extricate him from his troubles and send the clueless young man on a bus to Buenos Aires and ultimately a place at the Police training school. As Zapa gradually finds his feet in the big city, he begins an affair with one of his training officers and is gradually pulled into the system of corruption which keeps the system going. Along the way he loses his country boy innocence and becomes the protege of a senior officer named Gallo, played with menace by a strong Dario Levy, before a final confrontation with the man who threw his life this curve ball, Polaco.
The men and women in blue who police the streets of Buenos Aires as depicted in this film are unrecognisable from the typical image of an upright cop on patrol. There is nobody with a stern outlook and a strong moral outlook. This is an entrepreneurial activity. Traffic stops lead inevitably to bribery, a refusal to bow their will leads to violence and simply being in the wrong place at the wrong time can get you killed. They drink, they fight and argue and possess an almost fetishistic obsession with firearms. In short, this city is not for the faint of heart.
Zapa begins the film as a man so naive that he never once questions the possibility that these nice men he is opening the safe for could possibly be up to anything wrong. Yet over the course of the film, he becomes gradually drawn into the underbelly of the city and by the end is almost world weary and no longer the naive rookie he once was. Jorge Ramon's performance remains pleasingly quiet  and understated throughout. He very much carries the film and is perhaps the only moral touchstone in a sea of inequity.
All in all, this is a tense and engaging look at the modern Buenos Aires, post the economic crises of the 1990's. While it takes a grim view of the city, it is atmospheric throughout and to me at least captures a city on the edge but brimming with rhythm, crime, sex, death and life. It is well worth a look.


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