The Secret in Their Eyes

The Secret in Their Eyes (from Weird and Wonderful II: Fifty More Cult Films by George Hughes, available from www.freefall-productions.com)

2009 / Argentina / 129 minutes

“That part when the guy leaves for Jujuy… Her running on the platform after the man of her dreams, touching hands through the glass like they’re one… And her crying, like she knew her fate was mediocrity and never loving anyone, practically falling on the tracks, proclaiming love she’d never had the courage to confess… If that’s what happened, why didn’t you take me with you?”

Director: Juan Jose Campanella / Screenplay: Eduardo Sacheri & Juan Jose Campanella, based on the novel La Pregunta de sus Ojos by Eduardo Sacheri / Director of Photography: Felix Monti / Music: Federio Jusid / Production: Mariela Besuievsky and Juan Jose Campanella for Haddock Films / Cast: Ricardo Darin (Benjamin Esposito), Soledad Villamil (Irene Menendez Hastings), Carla Quevedo (Liliana Coloto), Pablo Rago (Ricardo Morales), Javier Godino (Isidoro Gomez), Guillermo Francella (Paulo Sandoval), Mariano Argento (Romano).

The Secret in Their Eyes is an incredibly powerful film that is at once an intimately personal relationship drama and an epic examination of an entire nation’s recent history. Juan Jose Campanella’s masterful adaptation of Eduardo Sacheri’s novel La Pregunta de sus Ojos (The Question in Their Eyes) appeared in the final few months of 2009 and almost instantly found itself hurriedly added to several “Best of the Decade” lists.

   Ferociously honest, unrelentingly real, utterly heartbreaking and emotionally exhausting, the film opens in 1974 with a staggeringly brutal rape and murder scene a million miles away from cheap Hollywood titillation in it’s sheer callousness. The victim, young schoolteacher Liliana Coloto (Carla Quevedo) will haunt Buenos Aires judiciary agent Benjamin Esposito (Ricardo Darin) for decades to come, with her vicious violation and battering to death foreshadowing what Argentina itself was about to go through at the hands of a violent military dictatorship.

   Romano (Mariano Argento), Esposito’s rival in the prosecution office, is happy to “Bodge Solve” the case by pinning it on two Bolivian labourers but Esposito himself agrees with Liliana’s husband Ricardo (Pablo Rago) that the death penalty would let the real perpetrator off too lightly and that literal life in prison (“A life full of nothing”) would be a more fitting punishment. With the assistance of his permanently pissed but occasionally brilliant partner Paulo Sandoval (Guillermo Francella), Esposito continues to investigate the case himself for another year.

   Eventually, Esposito and Sandoval identify Isidoro Gomez (Javier Godino) as the most likely suspect. Having grown up with Liliana in Chivilcoy, Gomez was known to have become obsessed with her (the “Secret” being visible within his intensely staring eyes in every photograph of the two of them together) and was in Buenos Aires at the time of the crime.

   While Esposito is reprimanded by his bosses for an authorised trip he took to Chivilcoy and is also forced to confront his own obsession with young judge Irene (Soledad Villamil), Sandoval is able to deduce the elusive Gomez’s other “Passion”: his support for Racing football club. Attending a Racing match at Huracan stadium, Esposito and Sandoval spot Gomez in the crowd and, after briefly attempting to escape, he’s arrested.

   Gomez is imprisoned when Irene provokes him into making a full confession by insulting his manhood but in 1976 Esposito discovers that Romano engineered Gomez’s release in exchange for work he did spying on rebels in prison for the Argentine Anticommunist Alliance, a far right death squad. With a vengeful Gomez on the loose and the military junta he serves about to take power, Esposito flees to Jujuy Province after Sandoval is murdered by the AAA.

   In 1999, long after the fall of the dictatorship, Esposito returns to Buenos Aires to seek out his lost love Irene. Now retired and trying to become a writer, he remains fascinated with the Coloto case and again begins to search for Gomez, first through Romano (now dead) and then through Ricardo who has been living in isolation in a secluded cottage since his wife’s murder…

   Exploring hefty themes of ageing, lost love, crime and punishment, the unreliability of memory and the collective trauma of a nation recovering from totalitarianism, The Secret in Their Eyes was rightly celebrated for it’s outstanding performances and excellent writing and has been a massive influence on some of the best film and TV work of the past ten years (see all three seasons of True Detective for more hopelessly flawed investigators taking on corrupt power structures to solve cases that won’t go away years after they began).

   But it’s also technically brilliant filmmaking- most notably, there’s the seemingly unbroken five minute shot taking the audience through an entire football stadium during a live match (really done with just 200 extras- the rest were added digitally and the whole sequence was designed by visual effects supervisor Rodrigo Tomasso).

   For British audiences of a certain age, Gomez’s support for Racing leading the authorities to apprehending him at a game will bring to mind Robert Carlyle’s unforgettable performance as Albie Kinsella, the Hillsborough survivor turned serial killer in the classic Cracker episode, To Be a Somebody (1994). In fact, The Secret in Their Eyes is a perfect example of Cracker creator Jimmy McGovern’s quote that “Great drama isn’t narrative complexity, it’s narrative simplicity and emotional complexity”.

   And like To Be a Somebody, it’s a story that finds time for plenty of “State of the Nation” stuff too. The “Present Day” scenes are set in 1999 because that was the last year of the amnesty laws which protected individuals like Gomez and Romano who had worked for the dictatorship between 1976 and it’s eventual fall in 1983 after Galtieri invaded the Falklands to improve his poll ratings.

   Galtieri, not realising that in Thatcher he was pretty much dealing with a female version of himself also not averse to a bit of bloodshed for an approval boost, believed the British wouldn’t respond militarily because of his US support. Of course, Thatcher infamously went straight for the military option, the islands were swiftly retaken and Washington abandoned the junta just as quickly, allowing the people to overthrow Galtieri and restore democracy the following year.

   Of course, US government support for dodgy types in South America sadly continues to this day, as does it‘s film industry’s. In a particularly rich recent example, the second season of Amazon’s otherwise pretty good Jack Ryan series is set in a (very) fictionalised Venezuela and is extremely politically irresponsible, especially for a production made and released during the single most corrupt US administration in history (although the show does substitute in a competent President).

   The season even takes the bizarre step of swapping Venezuela’s real left wing government and right wing opposition for a fictional right wing government and left wing opposition in order to make Ryan and his team’s interference in the country more palatable to modern audiences. Although he’d ultimately have no problem with the US sticking it’s oar in, even Ryan’s notoriously reactionary creator, the late Tom Clancy, would never have simplified and cheated a complex real world situation to quite such an extent. 

   Predictably, Hollywood also got it’s hands on the rights to La Pregunta de sus Ojos and an English language adaptation with Chiwetel Ejiofor and Nicole Kidman appeared in 2015 but, like Fincher’s remake of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, it was pretty unremarkable and certainly falls far short of the perfect version already made in the book’s country of origin.