Crying for the dark days of Argentina
Argentina saw a solar eclipse in 1975, an event suggestively captured in the middle of Benjamín Naishtat’s eerie period think-piece, Rojo. Day-trippers to the beach don the usual cardboard eyewear – all, that is, but the main character, a squinting lawyer called Claudio – while the sky turns blood red. Moments later, the moon has passed over, and games carry on as if nothing just happened.
The country was soon to enter a state of more permanent darkness, when the military junta took charge, and proceeded to wipe out dissident elements by “disappearing” them: kidnapped, tortured and murdered by the new government. Rojo recreates the apparent calm before this storm – hiding a twitchy state of covert preparation, in which the outwardly respectable middle classes are complicit, wittingly or otherwise.
Naishtat takes us to a busy restaurant, where Claudio, played by
Wild Tales and Talk to Her’s Darío Grandinetti, is sat waiting for his tardy wife (Andrea Frigerio), and becomes involved in an excruciating altercation with another man (Diego Cremonesi).
This angry fellow claims he’s ready to order, and demands Claudio’s seat. The latter bides his time, and then unleashes a lawyerly tirade, full of shaming language and articulate
contempt, to a silent audience.
It’s a brilliantly squirmy set-piece, blending Ruben-östlund-level discomfort with a put-the-enemy-inhis-place monologue that’s more like a Tarantino slap-down. But Claudio is certainly not our white knight, and the point of Rojo is to show how his power-play to win out in this specific situation is a miniature precedent for his country’s moral defeat.
A predawn drive into the desert, with blood in a car’s back seat, will spell the vanishing of one of them. Just like after that eclipse, life goes on, though.
Even ordinary get-togethers are spiked with little clues, revealing treacherous power dynamics and the encroaching pitter-patter of statewide corruption. Rather than mouthpiece politics,Ro jo goes for conscience pricking metaphor, wheeling on a stage conjurer to make a woman disappear. It’s all about a society manoeuvring to stay at the dinner table while getting its unsavoury elements thrown out, and finding ways to stop them coming back.
The film’s one voice of critique or prophecy – other than Cremonesi’s furious malcontent – is its most sinister figure, a celebrity crime-solver first spotted behind Claudio’s shoulder, like a bloodhound closing in. This stand-in for Columbo, Detective Sinclair, is played by the always-great Alfredo Castro. His job is to investigate a missing person. Escorting Claudio into the desert, he speaks of the “greater evil” impending.
To Claudio, it’s all news: the superb Grandinetti, composed and cagey, suggests an entitlement that has rendered him perfectly oblivious to the slippery slope he’s on. He solves his problems by burying them in the wild, and might be equally surprised to learn that he’s the villain of this piece. He dons a wig in the last scene that could only suit someone who’s got away with murder – but the country is so wrapped up in pampering itself with lies, it doesn’t even notice.