"The Secret in Their Eyes," the Argentinean film that won the Best Foreign Film Oscar this year, is part love story, part mystery and part rumination about the nature of truth and memory. But it's all style from director Juan Jose Campanella.
Campanella's visual flourishes, along with great performances by Ricardo Darin and Soledad Villamil, hold the overstuffed film together. Among the standout moments is the opening scene of a woman running after a train to say goodbye to a man. Their hands touch through the window in a scene that likely sounds hokey as you read about it in print, but it works onscreen.
The other moment -- the one all the critics wrote about it, the one that likely helped push the film ahead of its Oscar competition -- is a long, serpentine scene at a soccer stadium accomplished in one shot. It's an incredible treat, much like the opening shot Orson Welles pulled off in "A Touch of Evil" (also highly recommended).
Still, all of that is just gravy. The real meat in any mystery movie is the mystery itself, and "The Secret In Their Eyes" gets this so right that all the other stuff -- visuals, a subtle and moving love story, the performances -- just add to the pleasure.
It's 1999, and retired federal justice agent Benjamin Esposito (Darin) is working on a novel based on a case that still haunts him: the 1974 rape and murder of 23-year-old Liliana Colito. The crime took place in her apartment after her husband, Ricardo Morales (Pablo Rago), had gone to his bank clerk job.
The movie then follows two timelines. In 1999, Esposito, while working on the book, begins to try tracking down the loose ends of the mystery. In 1974, we see the younger Esposito and his partner, the alcoholic but sharp Pablo Sandoval (Guillermo Francella), working on the Colito case with their new department head, Irene Menedez-Hastings (Villamil). Hastings also appears in the 1999 timeline, reading Esposito's manuscript for him.
In this time-split approach, the film is reminiscent of last year's "Broken Embraces" from Spanish director Pedro Almodovar, another movie that artfully mixes mystery and love, although with more sex. (It's available now on DVD.)
As the story unfolds, two things become clear: The 1974 case remains unresolved, and so do simmering feelings between Esposito and Hastings. How Campanella slowly builds on these two storylines, hopping between 1974 and 1999, is a remarkable achievement, helped by nuanced performances from Darin and Villamil and great supporting work from Francella (who gets the movie's best line, about passion) and Rago as the grieving husband. This film is showing this weekend at Burns Court in Sarasota and Tampa Theatre in Tampa.