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.

El Bonaerense

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.

Flick of The Day: Rampart

In late 1990's Los Angeles, a scandal engulfed the Rampart division of the LAPD and it's anti gang unit. Widespread allegations of corruption and police brutality and serious crime led to the implication of more than 70 officers in one of the largest corruption scandal ever. The fall out from this event is the setting for director Oren Moverman's Rampart, which is today's flick of the day.

Rampart

Woody Harrelson gives a grandstanding performance as LAPD officer David Brown, a man whose mere being pulses with rage. A veteran of the force, he is a deeply corrupt and compromised man who has committed many unknown crimes in the name of the law. By day he patrols the crime infested streets of Los Angeles populated by a melting pot of ethnicities while by night he carouses bars before returning home to his strange home life where he lives with his two daughters and two ex-wives who are both sisters. As the Rampart investigation reaches its height, David is caught on camera brutally beating a motorist who crashed into him. It appears that David is going to finally pay a penance for his career despite his own best efforts to wriggle out of the net. As his legal bills mount and his home life unravels, David goes to extremes to try and keep the job he loves.

Rampart is written by American crime writer James Ellroy, a man with a seeming fascination with hard bitten police officers and the underbelly of Los Angeles. Perhaps best known for his sprawling epic novel L.A Confidential  which was adapted by Curtis Hanson, his fingerprints are all over this film. For a writer of such dense plotting, the plot such as it is does not form a major part of Rampart. This is really a character study of one man and his actions. As such, Woody Harrelson inhabits the role completely giving a performance that has to be seen to be believed. Every muscle and sinew seems to pulse with menace and as a viewer you are left waiting for the explosion to occur with each new interaction.

While Harrelson's David is the sole focus for much of the film, there is a fine supporting cast in Anne Heche, Cynthia Nixon, Sigourney Weaver, Robin Wright and Steve Buscemi. It is a shame then that they are given so little to do. What exactly Robin Wright's character is in the script for is a mystery to me, she is another one of the numerous women who bed David through the course of the film but beyond that brings nothing and is a waste of a fine actress. This lack of development detract from the film and give it an uneven tone. You may wonder why you are bothering to follow dense conversations about the banalities of David's life and its unfortunate because Harrelson's performance deserves a better film. 

At times guilty of deplorable actions, at others terrifically verbose and with a remarkable ability to game the system, David Brown is an uncompromising creation that manages to avoid the clichés of the cop who bends the rules to catch the bad guy. David is a dark and bitter man who despite his obvious intelligence is unable to see he is his own worst enemy.

Dave Brown: I don't cheat on my taxes... you can't cheat on something you never committed to.

So then while this is a flawed movie, there is enough here to justify a viewing for Harrelson's performance alone. It could have been so much more but ends up as just a study of one man and really tails off at the end.