EL SECRETO EN SUS OJOS

Yeah, yeah don’t get sarcastic boys and girls I’m aware that it’s almost time for the Oscars for 2011. But I still have films to cross off the list you see (one of the more famous ones being The Hurt Locker. I have it in my archive I just have a “thing” about it rather like Shutter Island. My cinephile friends assure me they’re not of the same caliber though so I’m not hurrying…) . Now this one (Oscar winner for Best Foreign Picture) I missed out of pure lack of opportunity. Then I had a copy but only one specific machine would open it and then I either didn’t have the machine or the time (or the copy at times) cut a long story short, my free couple of hours, the dvd and the machine all crossed paths this very morning. And so you find me excitedly pounding my keyboard – Oh yes, a BRILLIANT film.
Then again, I already told you, I have a soft spot for Latin American cinema… Well, this is the story of Benjamin Esposito, now retired from the Prosecutors’ office in Argentina. As many people do when they retire, he too is thinking about the past, his memoirs and decides to write a book. A book about that one case that haunted him; the murder of a young woman who never found justice and her husband who loved her to distraction and was devastated by her death… He decides to look into it again, for that affair upset so much in his life, and although it is sometimes better just to let sleeping dogs lie, there are other times where they simply MUST be woken up…
Now, don’t you utter a great yawn and tell me “it’s just another whodunit”. Ok, it is a “whodunit”. But not “another” one – it’s a Latin American one. First of all, when we say “murder mystery” these days, such a lot of violence blood and gore seems to come into it by definition. Not the case here – with a couple of exceptions but hey, there has to BE a murder to investigate first, no? So it’s a good old-fashioned whodunit – and it’s just around 2 hours long so none of the CSI style rush-jobs (no offence meant I LOVE CSI but their plots don’t make good movies). Secondly, the characters are WONDERFULLY portrayed (I’m ashamed at this moment I don’t know more about the actors…). The characters are so very human, their stories are stories that may actually have happened to us, they react in ways you or I may well have reacted under those circumstances… This is precisely what I love about the whole South American “take” on life in films. I always find South American films so much “warmer” because they seem to describe life with much greater accuracy. Not just circumstantially but also – and for me more importantly – on an emotional level. A lot of the characters are not stylized, they have flaws and qualities and “off days” – the story seems to “happen” naturally as opposed to being guided along by an invisible hand… The secret in her eyes is a prime example of all this… Enjoy…