Directed by
Damian Szifron
The BMW pulls into the driveway of
the mansion late one night. The license
plate has been ripped askew and has blood marks on it. The kid leaps out of the car sobbing and
tells his parents that he hit a woman and fled from the scene. Soon, news about the hit-and-run is broadcast
on TV with an angry crowd gathering and demanding that police find the
perpetrator. The kid is scared. He
should be. Fortunately, his father is
rich. With the help of his own personal Michael
Clayton/Winston Wolf-type
“fixer,” the father hatches a scheme: Give $500,000 to the family’s poor
groundskeeper to take the fall for the kid.
The plan almost works. But soon the fixer demands a $500,000
retainer fee of his own. When the local
prosecutor arrives, he immediately sees right through the scheme and demands a
$1 million payment in order to keep silent.
When the groundskeeper sees that the prosecutor is being paid more
money, he demands an increase of his own.
And so it goes. More money, more
convoluted details, and more angst for the father who in earnest just wanted to
do what he could to keep his kid out of prison.
This story, entitled La Propuesta (The Proposal), is one of
the six 20-minute episodes from Damian Szifron’s Relatos salvajes (Wild Tales), and it is also the
strongest. It works because all the events take place within a self-contained
time and place: A single evening, at a single location. Its story does not contain enough characters
or dramatic situations or progressions to merit a feature-length film, but the moral
questions it asks are of the same caliber as the best of Renoir, Kurosawa or Hitchcock:
What is the price of a human life? Who
has the authority to set the price of a human life, and is it ethical, if put
in a position of vast financial wealth, to indulge in temporary deceit in order
to amend unfortunate happenstance if the result is a greater good for all? Look at the facts: The son stays out of
prison, the groundskeeper’s family is abundantly provided for, the dead woman’s
family gets justice, and heck, you could even say wealth is more equitably
distributed among all the parties. But
of course, there is always a steep price to pay – a price greater than any
amount of money – when deception and human fallacy are at the center of a
cover-up. The conclusion of La Propuesta illustrates this in no
uncertain terms in its startling and abrupt climax.
Had La Propuesta been a feature film, we perhaps would have gotten a
deeper backstory into the troubled father-son relationship or the difficulties
the groundskeeper faces at home with his poor wife and children, or the way
that the prosecutor is trying to work his way up the corporate ladder at
work. Of course, we don’t need any of
that. The episode’s greatest strength lies
in its brevity – its simple and lucid examination of character types and their
flaws, and how hasty, rash, immoral thinking leads to tragic results. Further depth would only proselytize. That’s the benefit of a short film. It stays with us just long enough to get the
major point across and not too long that the point becomes banal.
In some ways, La Propuesta is the most atypical of Wild Tales’ episodes. Most
of the others are more comedic and even operatic, as in the case of El mas fuerte (The Strongest), where a
simple game of chicken played between two drivers on a remote highway escalates
into deranged anger and homicidal rage.
This comes dangerously close to veering into Tex Avery material, but Szifron does a good job at showing the intoxication that rage
and violence sometimes breeds; one-upmanship simply isn’t enough. There is a cathartic thrill to unleashing the
anger that resides deep within even the friendliest of people. The episode concludes in a deeply ironic
vein, but also in a way that illustrates the absurdity of violence as well as
the universality of passionate anger.
If there is a recurring theme in the
episodes of Wild Tales, it may be how
extreme revenge rarely fulfills its stated intentions. An example of this is found in Las Ratas (The Rats), which tells the
tale of a chance encounter between a young waitress and the man who destroyed
her family’s well-being and caused her father’s suicide. When this man enters her restaurant on a dark
and rainy evening, the waitress tells her cook that she’s been waiting her
entire life to have the enact revenge on the man. The cook suggests poisoning his food, which
at first appalls the waitress, but gradually begins to intrigue her. Like La
Propuesta, the episode initially revolves around the moral decision-making
that the waitress is forced to make, and concludes with the unintended and
tragic consequences that stem from that decision.
Another episode, Pasternak, is the unfortunate byproduct
of bad timing on a global news scale.
The story involves a seemingly random group of people on board a plane
who gradually realize they share a common connection to a mentally disturbed individual
out to enact revenge on each of them.
Then they realize this individual is in the cockpit of the plane. This story, which feels labored and pat in
its standard O. Henry-esque formulation, is unfunny in its own right and even
less so as a result of the recent Germanwings Flight 9525 crash (somehow seeing a doomed flight hijacked by a mentally
unstable pilot doesn’t feel especially funny or novel). The episode ends with the pilot’s
psychologist pleading through the cockpit door that his feelings of worthlessness
stem solely from his parents. This sets
up the last image of the episode, which looks spectacular from a visual
standpoint but from a narratively, comes off rather inert and depressing when I would assume the intent was poetically comic.
The other two episodes, Bombita (Little Bomb) and Hasta que la muerte nos separe (Until
Death Do Us Part) involve individuals who are put through tremendous
suffering. In Bombita, a structural engineer’s car is unfairly towed by the
corrupt municipal towing authority, which prompts a downward spiral leading to
the engineer’s firing, divorce from his wife, and accumulating debt from parking
tickets. The engineer decides to
undertake a plan of revenge enacted against the towing authority. At times this episode feels like it’s going
down a similar path to Pasternak in
its disturbingly lightweight depiction of homegrown terrorism, but fortunately,
the engineer’s fate takes a heroic turn.
In Hasta que la muertre nos separe,
which concludes the film, a joyous wedding takes a turn for the worst when the
bride is informed her new husband has not been faithful. The excessively madcap anger of the bride
makes her feel like a character from a Pedro Almodovar film (not
surprisingly, Almodovar is listed as an Executive Producer) and as
the wedding devolves into mass uncivilized chaos, the bride and groom soon
realize the futility of their actions.
With the exception of La Propuestra, none of these films are masterpieces,
but indeed that is precisely the beauty of the short film form – the episodes
never grow long enough to become an unwelcome presence. They are generally light, amusing, and often
surprising. According to Wikipedia, Wild Tales is the most widely-seen
Argentine film of all-time, which given its bold and breezy structure is not
particularly surprising. During its opening
credit sequence, cast and crew names are presented on top of backgrounds
featuring still photographs of wild animals.
What does Damian Szifron mean by this? It could be read as humans being no more
civilized than our brethren of the animal kingdom. Or something else entirely. We do not know the answer, nor the ways in
which the six episodes are related (or if such a throughline even exists), but
the catalog of images and the films do just enough for Wild Tales to leave an indelible impact on audiences, just like all
good short films should.
(Note: Wild Tales was Argentina’s official submission to the Best Foreign
Language Film category of the 87th Academy Awards).
Rating: 3 Stars
No comments:
Post a Comment