Soledad Villamil (Irene), Ricardo Darin (Esposito)
Film Friday
Warning: The following essay contains spoilers.
Today I sing the praises of The Secret in Their Eyes, the Juan Jose Campanella film from Argentina that won the 2009 Foreign Film Oscar. It is more than a gripping film about investigating a murder, although it is also that. It is a guide to how we should deal with past trauma.
In the film, prosecutor Benjamin Esposito becomes determined to solve the murder of a beautiful woman, even though the case is closed. An unscrupulous colleague frames two immigrant workers for the crime, but Esposito is able to figure out, from the woman’s scrapbook, who the real killer probably is. He can tell this by the way a certain man is looking at her in multiple photographs. The eyes hold the secret to the mystery.
I won’t go into all the twists and turns of the plot, but there is an interesting parallel between the husband of the murdered woman and Esposito. The husband is so obsessed with the murder that he lets it define his life. In fact, we learn at the end of the film that he has captured the killer (who was released by the corrupt prosecutor so that he could do dirty work for the State) and is keeping him in perpetual imprisonment. He may be the jailer but he is also a prisoner of the past.
Esposito too seems caught by the past. Sometimes this seems good: he refuses to allow the case to be closed but pushes on until he captures the real criminal. But then there are new developments: after the killer is released, he and his friends in high places come after Esposito (they kill a friend) so that he must flee. He moves to the countryside and gets married. Years later he returns and decides that he must write a book about the affair. Irene, his former boss who helped him crack the case, tells him that she is more interested in looking forward than back.
In the decades that have transpired, the killer appears to have disappeared off the face of the earth. Esposito looks up the husband, who seems to have made peace with the killer’s disappearance. This confuses Esposito because the man’s love had seemed deep and enduring. Which, in a sense, it proves to be, given that he has the killer locked away in a back room.
Eventually we learn why Esposito is really returning to the incident. He was in love with Irene, his upperclass, Harvard-trained boss who took risks with him to solve the murder. He buried his love, however, perhaps because of a lack of self-confidence (caused in part by his lower-class status). Returning to the case is actually an opportunity to revisit a missed opportunity. His own marriage has fallen apart, and he discovers that he made a mistake in not asking Irene to flee with him.
He could allow himself to be trapped endlessly in past regret, like the husband. But the husband functions as a wake-up call. When Esposito sees, by the look in Irene’s eyes, that she is trapped in a loveless marriage, he decides to step out of the past and into a new future. He walks into Irene’s office and she in turn realizes, by the new look in his eyes, that they will make a future together. It will be complicated, she warns him. The look in his eyes informs her that complications will not derail them this time. The film communicates all of this in a wonderfully understated manner.
I wonder if Secrets in Their Eyes helps the director, and helps Argentines generally, deal with their own awful past. From 1976-83 the Argentine military dictatorship engineered the “disappearance” of 30,000 people (“los desaparecidos”). The country is still dealing with this tragedy.
The film suggests that, while Argentines must acknowledge the crimes of the past, they must avoid obsessing about them. A balancing act is required. While they should not sweep the killings under the rug, they should also look towards the future. If they do so, Campanella assures them, they will be able to reclaim the possibilities that were ripped from them. A beautiful marriage may once have been destroyed, but love can flourish again. Even in advanced age.
How do we know that these possibilities still exist? Look closely into Argentine eyes. And if you yourself feel trapped by past trauma, look into your own eyes as well.