Film: Carancho (Pablo Trapero, Argentina, 2010)

Everyone seems to be experiencing the same thing with Carancho: the suddenness of its acceleration. Not sudden in the sense of pulling the Hollywood-thriller plot-twist lever (not even just Hollywood...thrillers the world over) because we tend to feel the onset of all that about as subtly as acid reflux. The effect is very different here and it culminates in the third act when we are suddenly taken by a feeling of “holy shit, the stakes are really high, when did this even start happening?” There is almost no precedent for it, yet it feels completely earned and natural. This feeling of abruptness comes, ironically, from the film's initial reluctance to even narratively grip its audience. 


The film begins as an anti-thriller. As opposed to the genre's usual dependency on time to give all that titillating thrust and tension, Carancho's characters live in a world of timelessness. Night and day fold into each other. They sleep at night, they sleep during the day, she wakes up at work and sets out as the sun is setting, he makes her breakfast (after they attempt to make love but she falls asleep for 12 hours) but it's dark out. And there's very little appearance of technology – phones (not to mention call display, which feels almost omnipresent in plot-driven cinema these days), computers and even clocks apparently get confiscated at the front gate of modern day Buenos Aires (what year is it anyway?). There isn't even – to my memory anyway – any music, just a lot of tired people trying to deal with shit. The shit piles up, we cut away from the scene. New day, new shit. A doctor on shift work dealing with both a wild west health care system and soul-chaffing (sometimes explosive) patient situations. An ambulance chaser attempting to help people without making too many ethically-disastrous manoeuvres (while also constantly looking for a way out of the game).


 It all seems very fragmentary, almost documentarian, as we meander through neo-realistic shards of glass and metal for two acts, nipping at bleak little samples of the country's insanely corrupt accident compensation system. Then, in the third act, the film does something I've never seen done like this before: Contrary to most films that establish itself as a thriller from the very beginning, thus preparing you, baiting you, playing with you and finally paying off with some “Shocking! Unexpected!” thriller stuff, Carancho just sort of finds a thriller narrative without betraying its intention to do so. All of the dross just sort of languidly comes together to form a tremendously immediate feeling of being cornered and needing to thread a needle to get out. Things have seemed to close in and its now all Darwinian claustrophobia. As though the film became a thriller out of necessity rather than design, as all of the monkeys in the little cage were too close to each other for too long and had to start eating each other's heads. It maybe wasn't the most fun or satisfying system of delivery, but a very effecting way of saying “life is hard, wear a helmet.” I'd recommend seeing it, but I may have diminished your experience of it a little (I went into the film almost completely ignorant of what was in store). Or maybe not: watch closely and see if you can notice...when do you shift from detachment to dread?