Right before the Computer Crash of 2011, I was working on adding subs to The Secret in Their Eyes, and I was lucky enough to upload it pre-catastrophe.
By all rights, this should not be a great film. It plays into most cliche's that make movies unwatchable, but for some reason every hokey twist and turn works perfectly. So perfectly that I spent wayyyy too much time muxing in as many subtitles as I could find. Now Slovenians can partake. El Secreto de sus ojos is a great film. Enjoy!
From Ricardo Darin at the New York Times:
The past continually forces its way into the present in “The Secret in Their Eyes,” an attractive, messy drama riddled with violence and edged with comedy that comes with a hint of Grand Guignol, a suggestion of politics and three resonant, deeply appealing performances. Set primarily in contemporary Argentina with intermittent flashbacks to the 1970s when the country was descending into a military dictatorship, the film is by turns a whodunit (and why), a romance and something of a ghost story. A young dead woman lies at the center of the mystery, but she’s scarcely the only thing here haunting the living.
If it takes a while to get a handle on the identity of the dead woman, it’s because she’s initially conjured up in the imagination of Benjamin (Ricardo Darín), a former court investigator. Now retired, Benjamin first encountered the woman years earlier at her home, where her naked body, as is too often true of movie corpses, was decoratively arranged on her death bed. The culprit, at least when it comes to aestheticizing this particular horror, is the writer and director Juan José Campanella, who has a tendency to gild every lily, even a dead one. That inclination explains some of the film’s sudden shifts in mood and outlandish plot twists, both of which can be preposterous but also create tension, surprise and a sense of disquiet that borders on dread.
Benjamin, having decided to write about the dead woman, revisits her murder, a pursuit that leads from the typed page into the offices of a judge and former colleague, Irene (Soledad Villamil). A quarter-century ago, Irene was his much younger supervisor, toiling with him in a warren of book-lined, paper-strewn rooms alongside a boozing, desperate clown, Sandoval (Guillermo Francella). Together the three tried to navigate around a bigger boss, a jaundiced judge, and through a system where the poor were railroaded for crimes they didn’t commit so they could serve the needs of the powerful. One such crime involves the dead woman.
At first, the murdered woman — or rather how Benjamin’s inquiry into her death affects him — brings to mind Otto Preminger’s “Laura.” In that 1944 noir, Dana Andrews plays a detective who, while investigating what he believes is the murder of the title character (Gene Tierney, a natural stiff), falls in love with the victim, or rather her portrait. Benjamin doesn’t fall in love with his dead woman, though the way he looks at her corpse and then her photographs suggests more than he can admit. But this long-gone woman seems to exert a hold on him, possessing him while he pecks out another page, as the camera crawls through the shadows and Mr. Campanella pokes into the past.
Mr. Campanella’s eclectic résumé includes several films made in his native country (“Son of the Bride,” a comedy) and numerous directing gigs for American television shows, including the “Law & Order” franchise. Although he executes some flashy moves in “The Secret in Their Eyes,” routinely calling attention to the camera — as in an aerial shot of a stadium in which the camera appears to descend seamlessly into the roaring crowd before chasing after a single character — it’s the performances that stick with you, along with Sandoval’s booze-soaked melancholia, an occasional scripted eccentricity and the chaos of the increasingly impotent justice system. The scenes between Mr. Darín and Ms. Villamil aren’t subtle (their eyes aren’t especially secretive), but they appealingly convey the warmth of habit and heat of regret.
The intimacy between Benjamin and Irene is lightly handled, as are several comic scenes — including a funny exchange during which Benjamin and Salvador’s amateur sleuthing comes under mocking attack — which show Mr. Campanella at his most nimble. (That adroitness helped the film win this year’s Academy Award for best foreign-language picture.) Less persuasive is his use of the military dictatorship, which takes on ugly human form primarily in the characters of a violent criminal and a bureaucrat who facilitates his brutality. The scenes with these thugs are blunt and effective: the creep-out factor is high. But they also frame the dictatorship in terms of individual pathologies, with little evident politics to make anyone feel uncomfortable as the memories of murder are inevitably turned into smiles.
Technical Information:
Title: El secreto de sus ojos/The Secret in Their Eyes
Year: 2009
Country: Argentina
Director: Juan José Campanella
Source: Retail Bluray
Video Codec: 720p x264
Container: .mkv
Size: 4.37 GB
Length: 2:09:15
Programs used: mkvmerge
Resolution: 1280x544
Aspect Ratio: 2.35:1
Video: MPEG4 AVC H264 @~ 4201 kb/s
Frame Rate: 24 fps
Audio: Spanish- Dolby AC3 5.1 @ 640 kb/s
Subtitles: English, Slovenian, Finnish, Hungarian, Vietnamese, Greek, Swedish, French, Bulgarian, Indonesian, Romanian, Italian, German
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