Here you have another one from www.salon.com from Andrew O´Hehir.
The most original new thriller since "Memento."
It's cult-movie week here at Beyond the Multiplex world HQ. What do I mean by that? On some level I don't mean anything: Anybody who's lucky enough to make an independent film and actually get it released hopes it will become a cult movie, hopes it will capture an electrified germ of the Zeitgeist and spread from city to city, from one fevered dinner conversation to another, like an especially virulent strain of the flu.
Still, there are categorical differences. "Little Miss Sunshine" and "An Inconvenient Truth" are this year's big hits (by indie standards). But they're not cult movies. Nobody needed to see them twice, or is likely to keep those DVDs in a place of honor, permanently leaning against the TV, case never quite closed. A cult movie has an audience (be it large or small) that never wants to let go, that finds in that picture a wit or a soul or an existential clarity found nowhere else. A cult movie can be obscure or well known, but it cannot be totally familiar or too widely loved. "Carnival of Souls" and "Reservoir Dogs" and "Solaris" can be cult movies; "Citizen Kane" and "Vertigo" and "The Godfather" cannot.
The Aura
From The N.Y.Times by A.O.Scott, published November 17, 2006
The Argentine director Fabián Bielinsky died after a heart attack in June, at 47, leaving behind a small but potent body of work. His first feature film, “Nine Queens” (2000), a gritty, twisting crime story, holds a special place in the recent wave of innovative filmmaking to come out of Argentina (and not only because it was pointlessly remade in Hollywood a few years later under the unintentionally apt title “Criminal”).
In both “Nine Queens” and his second (and final) film, “The Aura,” Mr. Bielinsky made use of a familiar film noir vocabulary, but not for the usual young-fimmaker-in-a-hurry purpose of showing off his facility with genre tricks. Rather, his movies restore some of the clammy, anxious atmosphere that made the old noirs so powerful to begin with.
The world of “The Aura” is, quite obviously, a heightened and stylized version of reality, but its governing emotions of dread, suspicion and moral confusion are bracingly real. With the exacting ruthlessness of a novel by Georges Simenon, it tells the story of an ordinary man — a taxidermist whose name is never mentioned — caught up in a web of crime, accident and mistaken identity.
On a hunting expedition the taxidermist (Ricardo Darín) finds himself alone in the woods with a gun, stalking a stag and killing a man by mistake. The dead man, it turns out, was involved in the plotting of a casino heist, and the taxidermist, who once fantasized about becoming a master criminal, takes his place in the scheme.
The reversals and shocks of the plot are brilliantly handled, but Mr. Bielinsky’s achievement is to generate an even deeper kind of suspense. Yes, you wonder what will happen next, who will live and who will die, but those local, procedural questions arrive with a tremor of uncertainty about the reliability of perception and the nature of fate.
The taxidermist suffers from a number of maladies: disappointment, loneliness and epilepsy chief among them. The film’s title refers to the state of disorientation that precedes one of his seizures. That these occur without warning adds to the mood of apprehensive, terrified alertness that hovers over this story, which Mr. Bielinsky wrote as well as directed.
The other chief components of the film’s uniquely unsettling aura are its setting — a heavily forested part of Patagonia, where isolated hunting camps offer recreation for sportsmen and cover for criminals — and Mr. Darín’s droopy, inscrutable face. He is rarely off screen, and for long stretches he barely utters a word, but he moves through “The Aura” like a concentrated, unpredictable weather system, sometimes spookily calm, more often agitated by some combination of worry, determination and regret. His moments of decency and compassion are as surprising as his episodes of ruthlessness.
And the movie, even when it bends toward convention, never loses sight of its hero’s haunted, desperate perception of the world. For his part, Mr. Bielinsky, in what would sadly be his last film, demonstrates a mastery of the form that is downright scary.
THE AURA
Opens today in Manhattan.
Written (in Spanish, with English subtitles) and directed by Fabián Bielinsky; director of photography, Checo Varese; edited by Alejandro Carrillo Penovi and Fernando Pardo; art director, Mercedes Alfonsín; produced by Pablo Bossi, Samuel Hadida, Gerardo Herrero and Mariela Besuievsky; released by IFC First Take. At the IFC Center, 323 Avenue of the Americas, at Third Street, Greenwich Village. Running time: 138 minutes. This film is not rated.
WITH: Ricardo Darín (Taxidermist), Dolores Fonzi (Diana), Pablo Cedrón (Sosa), Nahuel Pérez Biscayart (Julio), Jorge D’Elia (Urien) and Alejandro Awada (Sontag).
The Argentine director Fabián Bielinsky died after a heart attack in June, at 47, leaving behind a small but potent body of work. His first feature film, “Nine Queens” (2000), a gritty, twisting crime story, holds a special place in the recent wave of innovative filmmaking to come out of Argentina (and not only because it was pointlessly remade in Hollywood a few years later under the unintentionally apt title “Criminal”).
In both “Nine Queens” and his second (and final) film, “The Aura,” Mr. Bielinsky made use of a familiar film noir vocabulary, but not for the usual young-fimmaker-in-a-hurry purpose of showing off his facility with genre tricks. Rather, his movies restore some of the clammy, anxious atmosphere that made the old noirs so powerful to begin with.
The world of “The Aura” is, quite obviously, a heightened and stylized version of reality, but its governing emotions of dread, suspicion and moral confusion are bracingly real. With the exacting ruthlessness of a novel by Georges Simenon, it tells the story of an ordinary man — a taxidermist whose name is never mentioned — caught up in a web of crime, accident and mistaken identity.
On a hunting expedition the taxidermist (Ricardo Darín) finds himself alone in the woods with a gun, stalking a stag and killing a man by mistake. The dead man, it turns out, was involved in the plotting of a casino heist, and the taxidermist, who once fantasized about becoming a master criminal, takes his place in the scheme.
The reversals and shocks of the plot are brilliantly handled, but Mr. Bielinsky’s achievement is to generate an even deeper kind of suspense. Yes, you wonder what will happen next, who will live and who will die, but those local, procedural questions arrive with a tremor of uncertainty about the reliability of perception and the nature of fate.
The taxidermist suffers from a number of maladies: disappointment, loneliness and epilepsy chief among them. The film’s title refers to the state of disorientation that precedes one of his seizures. That these occur without warning adds to the mood of apprehensive, terrified alertness that hovers over this story, which Mr. Bielinsky wrote as well as directed.
The other chief components of the film’s uniquely unsettling aura are its setting — a heavily forested part of Patagonia, where isolated hunting camps offer recreation for sportsmen and cover for criminals — and Mr. Darín’s droopy, inscrutable face. He is rarely off screen, and for long stretches he barely utters a word, but he moves through “The Aura” like a concentrated, unpredictable weather system, sometimes spookily calm, more often agitated by some combination of worry, determination and regret. His moments of decency and compassion are as surprising as his episodes of ruthlessness.
And the movie, even when it bends toward convention, never loses sight of its hero’s haunted, desperate perception of the world. For his part, Mr. Bielinsky, in what would sadly be his last film, demonstrates a mastery of the form that is downright scary.
THE AURA
Opens today in Manhattan.
Written (in Spanish, with English subtitles) and directed by Fabián Bielinsky; director of photography, Checo Varese; edited by Alejandro Carrillo Penovi and Fernando Pardo; art director, Mercedes Alfonsín; produced by Pablo Bossi, Samuel Hadida, Gerardo Herrero and Mariela Besuievsky; released by IFC First Take. At the IFC Center, 323 Avenue of the Americas, at Third Street, Greenwich Village. Running time: 138 minutes. This film is not rated.
WITH: Ricardo Darín (Taxidermist), Dolores Fonzi (Diana), Pablo Cedrón (Sosa), Nahuel Pérez Biscayart (Julio), Jorge D’Elia (Urien) and Alejandro Awada (Sontag).