short film reviews, criticism, and occasional musing.

Wednesday, October 20, 2010

CIFF 2010 - Carancho (2010, Argentina)

Sometimes I like to see films without any prior knowledge of the story. When picking out screenings for this year’s CIFF, I saw that Ricardo Darin (9 Queens, The Aura) was starring in a new Argentine film, and I was pretty much sold on the spot. I’m a fan of Darin’s – his hangdog face belies a menace that is regularly put to good use, Carancho being no exception. In it, Darin plays Sosa, an ambulance chaser mysteriously bereft of his law license, but extraordinarily good with suffering clients. At an accident site, he meets Luján, a doctor working as a paramedic who has her own secrets to hide. Soon enough, the two fall into a nascent relationship, complicated as much by their distinct professional interests as by the demons they’re trying to hide.

Carancho’s best attribute, apart from Darin, who is typically good, is the energetic handheld camerawork, which excels at capturing the mood of frantic accident sites and hospital trauma wards. It’s surprisingly lovely in parts, too, such as a scene where Sosa and Luján share an early-morning coffee while cars whip through the frame around them. Less successful is the clumsy plotting, which hurtles the audience through the first stages of the story in order to get to the really juicy parts of this sad-sack love affair. But Carancho doesn’t really push things over the edge until the ludicrously obvious ending, which for me negated some of the stronger parts of the story, as director Pablo Trapero and his co-screenwriters chose to hit us over the head with an anvil rather than tie up their film in a more interesting, and realistic, way. As much as I’m generally not a fan of gritty melodramas (Tilda Swinton’s Julia comes to mind), this one could have been rescued somewhat had the filmmakers led more with the romance than with the tacked-on morality.

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