Country: Argentina/Switzerland
Director: Andreas Fontana
Time: 1 hour and 40 minutes
Where Can I Get It: Mubi (free w/subscription), Amazon ($4.99 to rent)
What It Evokes: Finance and complicity, Heart of Darkness, Argentina’s Dirty War
In the Swiss banking argot employed by Yvan de Wiel and his wife, Inés, “Azor” means “Be quiet, watch what you say.” This injunction also constitutes the film’s guiding principle. As the director Robert Bresson famously said, “Hide the ideas, but so that people find them. The most important will be the most hidden.” Azor’s ideas remain discoverable (in some cases blatantly so), but the work resists easy interpretation by marshaling information in spartan and austere ways, submerging audiences in an indeterminate world whose contours are only ever partly legible. Set at the rough midpoint of the military junta’s rule in Argentina (1976-1983), Azor succeeds primarily as a “mood” movie. It manages to be taut and tense while avoiding violent spectacle or obscure allusiveness.
Drawing from Joseph Condrad’s Heart of Darkness, the film’s plot is fairly straightforward: Yvan de Wiel, a partner at a Swiss private bank, travels with his wife to Buenos Aires in 1980 after the sudden disappearance of his associate, René Keys—a briefly displayed calendar in Keys’ abandoned apartment locates us in time. (The name is not the work’s most subtle aspect.) Yvan has traveled from Geneva to reassure clients and rebuild relationships, meeting with wealthy Argentinians of varying proximity to the junta in order to illicitly move their money out of the country, offer investment advice, and sympathize with their various complaints. He soon learns that Keys came into contact with someone or something called “Lazaro” in the days prior to his disappearance. The terms of the thriller are now set in motion.
Keys himself remains a figure of some mystery. His former clients—not particularly reliable sources—alternatingly describe him as upstanding or unhinged. Yvan’s meetings with these individuals, which chart his own increasing proximity to the regime, feature intimations of unsavory political happenings (all off-screen). One client speaks supportively of the government’s “re-education” of recalcitrant individuals (i.e. leftists and anti-junta activists). Another has lost a daughter who strayed into politics, one of the estimated 10,000-30,000 people killed or disappeared in Argentina following the 1976 coup. Information arrives obliquely. Violence has largely become abstract to this class of Argentinians and their Swiss banker, much like the money that links them. The Dirty War, a term coined by the junta, is never explicitly mentioned. Instead, the film masterfully builds a pervasive dread by slowly unshrouding the nefarious processes (long since set in motion) that now incorporate Yvan into their workings. The film’s crescendo encompasses no crystallizing spectacle, merely the complete abstraction of lives into funds. Yvan’s growing clarity on these processes and his consequent choices, in turn, reveal the real René Keys to us. It is an ending no less shocking for being so quiet.
Though finance remains central to the film, it isn’t particularly interested in the junta’s economic policies, which abandoned Perónist corporatism in favor of greater liberalization. Like Yvan’s private bank, which feels acute competition from newly arrived commercial banks, his clients belong to an ancien regime that made their money prior to the coup. Instead, Azor functions as a pointed critique of both secretive Swiss banking and elite complicity in accepting (or facilitating) political repression and corruption. These critiques are neither novel, nor Azor’s most interesting aspects. Great Argentine films dating to the 1980s (as well as last year’s Argentina, 1985) have explored the junta’s abductions, torture, disappearances, and violence, as well as its devastating aftereffects. These films have tended to showcase an innocent victim (often initially apolitical) or righteous crusader whose discovery of “the truth” represents liberation and opens redemptive future paths. There is something deeply seductive about this framing on a personal level, but as politics it can be a bit neat, “If only we learn what happened, we will agree on why it happened, and what should happen moving forward.” By contrast, Azor fits more comfortably beside some of the best Latin American literary works exploring repressive state apparatuses, from classics like Miguel Ángel Asturias’ 1946 Mr. President (Guatemala) to more recent treatments such as Bernardo Kucinski’s K (Brazil) or Roberto Bolaño’s By Night in Chile (Chile)—to name only a few within an absurdly rich literature—given its interest in the ubiquitous uncertainty that emerges not merely as a facet of the human condition, but as the byproduct of repressive political structures.
As Asturias’ novel understood so well, the contradictions inherent in repressive systems force narrative discontinuities and disjunctures in spite of the stability underpinning their presiding mythologies. To invoke the cliché, Borges-like labyrinths (institutional, informational) militate against the construction of meaning, severing any relationship to “truth.” Within repressive government systems, where official information dominates media and subterranean counter-narratives confront an onslaught of rumor, imperfectly glimpsed verities, and self-imposed silences, the discovery of even the simplest forms of “truth” (i.e. ascertainable facts upon which narratives construct themselves) rarely provide hoped for panaceas. Confronting the recent past with naked candor forces subjects to confront themselves, threatening to destabilize the accounts that allow them to function within the world. For good reason, self-deception has never gone out of fashion. By contrast, Azor’s true terror lies in its representation of clarity and the choices made by those who achieve it.
Go Down The Argentinian Film Rabbit Hole With:
Lucrecia Martel — La ciénaga (2001)
Santiago Mitre — Argentina, 1985 (2022)