El Aura: a complicated heist noir film of spooky mystery, escape and reinvention

Fabián Bielinsky, “El Aura / The Aura” (2005)

While promoting this film, Fabián Bielinsky died from a heart attack so “El Aura” and “Nueve Reinas / Nine Queens”, a clever heist classic, are all the full-length movies he has left to Argentine cinema. And a very excellent legacy Bielinsky has left behind too: cleverly made with complicated if not entirely serious plots and featuring considerable suspense and tension. “El Aura” is notable for its sweeping Patagonian desert and forest landscapes and the eerie atmosphere they possess, promising spooky mystery and potential for change and renewal. Spooky mystery and change leading to renewal are a-plenty in this suspenseful, almost existential psychological noir piece about the role fantasy and memory play in forging a new identity and changing people’s lives.

The action takes place over a week and the beginning and the ending of the film are almost much the same. Taxidermist Espinosa (Ricardo Darin) has a fantasy about committing the perfect crime and relates his fantasy to a friend who invites him on a hunting trip. Since Espinosa’s wife has just walked out on him, Espinosa agrees to accompany his friend. They drive to a remote bed-n-breakfast place run by Diana Dietrich (Dolores Fonzi) and her teenage brother Julio (Nahuel Pérez Biscayart). The two men go hunting and have a disagreement so they separate. Espinosa has one of his epileptic attacks in which his past, present and future all meld together; just after this attack, he sees what he thinks is a deer and ends up shooting … Diana’s husband (Manuel Rodal). This unfortunate incident leads Espinosa to investigate Dietrich’s affairs and uncover the man’s secret: Dietrich is a career criminal specialising in holding up armoured vehicles and stealing all their money. Suddenly Espinosa has the opportunity to take over Dietrich’s work and carry out another heist with Dietrich’s partners and Julio.

The film is leisurely paced, allowing viewers the time to admire and immerse themselves in the wide desert vistas, the quiet green forests, the rundown factory town Cerro Verde and above all the plot. Darin plays the loner Espinosa to perfection: this taxidermist is very much an outsider, ill at ease in the world around him, who lives in the world of his mind which turns out to be quite vivid and which saves his skin on several occasions in the film despite the epilepsy. The plot and Espinosa’s character develop steadily with room for laughs as well as suspense and sudden violence. The cinematography is beautiful and never more so when Espinosa suffers a fit: the turning camera captures vividly the visions that Espinosa has, his feeling of being apart from everything yet of it and the final black-out he experiences – this might be the closest cinema has come to delineating what an epileptic fit might be like to experience vicariously.

While astute viewers can almost predict how the plot turns out – I got the feeling early on that Espinosa will release Diana from the mental and physical prison her father and Dietrich placed around her and that Dietrich’s two partners will come to a grisly end – the gradual and confident unfolding is a pleasure to follow and keeps the viewer spellbound all the way to the end. If you subsist on a diet of Hollywood cinematic and TV thriller fare though, you may find “El Aura” slow and low-key as thrillers go.

Escape and reinvention are constant themes throughout the film: all characters desire or achieve escape of one sort or another though it may not be the kind of escape they desire. Even Espinosa, for all his wishful thinking, finds that escape through fantasy does not quite translate well into real life; priding himself on his ability to remember detail, there is one detail he fails to remember which becomes relevant to the heist that Dietrich and his friends were planning together and which he, Espinosa, stumbles upon and takes over. He eventually retreats from escape and is left with Dietrich’s sinister wolf-like pet dog. Perhaps the only person who achieves a successful escape and who may be able to achieve a new identity is Diana. Chance plays a major part too: it is by chance that Espinosa kills Dietrich and by chance several times during the film that Espinosa manages to escape death himself. This brings an aura (ha!) of dread and apprehension over the film itself. Espinosa’s alienation from the world and his laconic hang-dog expression add to the morose, insular and paranoiac atmosphere.

The conclusion may or may not come as a surprise though on reflection it should not really be a surprise: Espinosa finds he has bitten off more than he can chew, the world does not conform to his perceptions and expectations and even the experiences he has just before and during his epileptic fits and the visions he sees in those brief unsettling moments when he steps outside temporal reality are of limited help to him. The character may or may not have been changed by his experiences – viewers must decide for themselves if he has. Even when everything seems all wrapped up and no loose ends have been left behind, an uneasy mystery remains. “El Aura” is well-named.

 

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