This is my contribution to !f istanbul’s daily journal ‘!f gaste’ (on the occasion of Carancho’s first ever Turkish screeening) that they used to distribute during the festival’s 2011 edition. Reading retrospectively, I might need to work through some details again on this partial review to improve the coherency, In the write-up, I mainly draw attention to the social background of the movie while focusing on the certain stylistic aspects (and very short genealogical introduction to Argentinean New Wave) that I was able to pin down during the first viewing.
Having already flavored by !f regulars at the previous editions, the New Argentine Cinema endorses itself as being one of the most original ‘new waves’ currently in circulation. Genealogically speaking, it can be traced back to the early 2000s where now-already-auteur’ized filmmakers such as Lucrecia Martel (Headless Woman, The Swamp), Lisandro Alonso (Los Muertos, Liverpool), Pablo Trapero (Crane World, El Bonaerense), Diego Lerman (Suddenly), Mariano Llinás (Historias extraordinarias) and Pablo Agüero (Salamander) had been cranking up their debuts or they were about to venture into their second features in the aftermath of corralitos and cacerolazos. In addition to this, tremendous buzz these filmmakers received in the festival circuit, and eventual regulations and changes in the support scheme of independent films (thanks to the organizations such as BAFICI, INCAA) led the international film circuit to consider this ongoing movement as one of the most original and striking amongst the current new waves. Most of these films forged a cluster of features where a certain sense a neo-neorealism, voracious risk taking in the narrations, and maybe the most common denominator being their intensely personal experimentations (even in the most straightforward genre pictures) loom large.
Carancho is the 6th feature film Pablo Trapero has produced since his 1999 indie debut, Crane World. The Spanish title of the film, for the reasons unknown, has not been translated into English during its international festival run. Although the film’s title can literally be translated as ‘vulture’; it clearly resonates with Sosa’s (played by excellent Ricardo Darin, the lead actor of Oscar awarded The Secret in Their Eyes) own moral corruption and internal conflicts he has been undergoing. He is accompanied by Martina Gusma, who has been Trapero’s regular and production partner since El Bonaerense (2002).
The statistical facts we see while the opening credits run seems to set the film’s tone:
In Argentina, more than eight thousand people die every year in road accidents at a daily average of twenty-two. More than a hundred and twenty thousand are injured. Only the last decade has seen one hundred thousand deaths. The millions of pesos that every victim represents in medical and legal expenses produces an enormous market, supported by the compensations of insurance companies and the weakness of the law. Behind every tragedy, there is an industry.
Sosa is a lawyer, who is specialized in the car accidents, preys on the victims of car accidents and their families. He works for a corrupt network scheme where police, mafia and other lawyers involved as part of so-called organization called ‘the foundation’. His job is to spot the easiest (mostly poor and desperate ones) preys in order for ‘the foundation’ to make profit over false medical claims and insurance scams. Having recently lost his law license, he wants to restore his status as a lawyer, but his past –malpractice- being used against him to keep his actions under control. When he meets Luján, a medic who is not quite able to cope with the demanding work conditions of the night shift she tries to save the lives of Sosa’s future ‘preys’, he is ready to make changes that reveals the complex underpinnings of his character. He decides to break with the past, heads to a brighter future with her.
Trapero meticulously pictures a world of modern noir with complex psychological forays, with ever present moral decay and ultimately very accurate sociological conclusions and conflicts within the tightened borders of a nearly perfect genre study. Carancho is once again set in San Justo, at the core of Gran Buenos Aires (as Argentinean critic/film programmer Quintin aptly describes, it’s “the suburban ring around Buenos Aires” where “half of the population lives, a gigantic urban landscape mainly inhabited by an endlessly decaying middle class.”) where Trapero had used in his first features until Familia Rodante (2004). Gloomy, realistically unsettling tone underneath the film’s surface effectively points to the outer margins of genre’s expectations while managing to create a full-fledgedly realized world. As Quintin rightly opined at the conclusion of his article: “ (…) Carancho describes from inside a fast machine that wants everyone else’s money from which escape is impossible. And that’s what cinema is about. Trapero agrees to play the game and he’s in the same position as Darin: a very talented operator, trying to push things forward, always keeping in mind that there might be a different way of doing things.” (Cinema Scope, #43, Spotlight Cannes 2010)
