SICARIO: DAY OF THE SOLDADO
RIGHT IN THE MIDDLE OF THE TENSE, fast-paced thriller Sicario: Day of the Soldado, noise from car chases and the sharp rat-a-tat-tats of military guns suddenly disappear. A stifling quiet fills the air as the film’s protagonist Alejandro (Benicio Del Toro) and his hostage Isabela (Isabela Moner) stumble through the desert and come across a ramshackle farmhouse and its owner, who is deaf and cannot speak. Then, a moment of surprise: Alejandro starts to communicate in sign language and reveals an intimate detail about himself as he asks a favour of the farmer, an unexpectedly tender moment for the weary, revenge-bent hitman.
“In our movie, incommunicability is one of the topics, and in this scene I think that we portray it perfectly,” director Stefano Sollima says. “He has to break an internal border.”
Day of the Soldado follows Del Toro’s hitman from 2015’s Sicario as he aids the United States Drug Enforcement Agency in kidnapping Isabela, a teenage cartel princess, as part of a bigger plan to stem the flow of drugs crossing the Us–mexico border. That plan goes awry, and the duo face a new reality on the porch of this farmhouse. Alejandro contemplates sparing her life, as it was Isabela’s father who killed Alejandro’s wife and daughter. “I think that starts working in Alejandro’s conscience, the idea that he’s inflicting on this kid what the bad guys did to his daughter,” Del Toro says.
To capture the early-morning sunlight in the desert just west of Albuquerque, New Mexico, Sollima knew he had only about 25 minutes to shoot the pivotal conversation between Alejandro and Isabela. “With this light, you have to be really fast,” he says. “We did a long rehearsal, so when we had the good light, we just shot it. We had two amazing actors ... It was easy and beautiful to watch.”
Del Toro hadn’t anticipated the full significance of the scene until he saw the film. “There’s something beautiful that I was not aware while we we’re doing the scene, that it would go to another level and add another texture to the relationship,” he says.