Azor

This has been on my MUBI watchlist for such a long time that I've forgotten why it intrigued me in the first place. Perhaps a glowing review in Sight and Sound? Who knows?

In any case, I suggest that you don't waste your time, unless slow-moving, talky, atmospheric drama is your thing. Sure, there are nasty themes bubbling under but I never quite worked out what the director was trying to say about all of this, beyond the obvious. (Different country and industry, but for me the TV series "Magnifica 70" handled the compromises inherent in living with a junta much more eloquently...)

For a debut feature, it's quite nicely shot but I'd definitely put it in the "mood piece" category rather than anything else.

In a few short sentences:

• Nice cinematography
• Weird and annoying soundtrack
• Ok acting
• Slow pace (slow enough to make me quit watching after 1/3 of the movie)

This remarkable Argentine-Swiss coproduction is set in the early years of the Argentine rule-by-junta. The topic, though, is broader: the intersection of élite cupidity and brutal politics worldwide, cloaked under a veneer of high-class gentility and, of course, excruciatingly extreme discretion. The horrors endemic to the place and time in which the film is set are rendered obliquely and allusively, and all the more powerfully for that.

The film is wonderfully cast. Every character, down to the smallest non-speaking cameo, conveys worlds of meaning, often in a single frame. Most striking of all is a Catholic Monsignor who is brilliantly parodied while he acts as a searingly sinister fulcrum, lifting part of the veil that hangs over the plot, putting me in mind of the terrifying Grand Inquisitor in Verdi's opera "Don Carlos" who pushes Philip II of Spain to kill his rebellious son just as, in order to save the world, "God sacrificed his own". This sequence, set during a small gathering in one of the inner sanctums of the junta élite, tells you more about what was then going on in Argentina than could more explicit scenes set in a torture chamber or execution field, while at the same time making clear what the banker is really there to do, and what the film is really about.

The gentility and costly need for constant secretiveness (a lesson is even given in a secret argot used by Geneva bankers, including the meaning of "azor") are chillingly conveyed by the lead couple, played by Fabrizio Rongione and Stéphanie Cléau. He perfectly personifies the suave, ultra buttoned-down Swiss private banker, to the manor born, providing a master class in understated movie acting, conveying reactions with just the subtlest twitch of an eyelid or a small corner of his mouth. Her character is highly intelligent, ambitious, icily disciplined, both a judgmental antagonist and a tremendous resource for him, sussing out situations in which she is, even more (you sense) than usual in the macho world of the Argentine ruling classes (old and new), relegated to the sidelines, to the point of being more or less politely dismissed whenever serious business is to be discussed. (At one point, he is told to get rid of her prior to a key meeting: "no women".) She is perforce devoted to her husband yet bitter at the role she must play. Her greatest line, already widely quoted in reviews, comes when she is told by a tough-as-nails Argentine matriarch that she can see that "your husband loves you very much" (which is actually, you assume, a leading question), and Cléau, still smooth and icy but with just the subtlest flash of anger, responds., "Yes, he and I are but a single person. [Perfectly-timed pause.} And that person is him".

The film is in French and Spanish, with many of the Argentine characters (quite credibly, given their social standing) completely at home in French, while Rongione seems to have more than serviceable (though not perfect) Spanish. (Cléau seems to have almost none, which, if anything, serves to enhance the acuity of her observations.) The dialogue shifts constantly between the two languages, often in midsentence, none of which is flagged in the English subtitles even though, like every cue in this subtlest of movies, each shift conveys meaning.

Similarly, the film brings together two different, but intertwined and indeed interdependent, worlds. One is that of élites everywhere, but in this case of a post-putsch Latin American country among whom all are living in terror, though of what, or of whom, differs according to the person's social or political standing. The other is that of global private bankers, in this case Swiss, who provide vital services by protecting and processing wealth, whether gained by plunder by the current holders of power or inherited by established élites, presumably from plunder by their ancestors. Both worlds are scary, and their scariness is brilliantly conveyed, which is what makes this film so compelling. Though some of the in-jokes will be most amusing to Swiss viewers (outsiders will not necessarily spot the full contempt conveyed when one suave upper-class Swiss tells another that a third colleague is "from Zug"), the key structural role played by bankers worldwide in their dealings with the politically powerful and with the very rich, and the ways they help engineer mutations from one category to the other, could not be made clearer.

Without resorting to spoilers, I think it can be said that what's most striking about the film's final sequence is the sudden banality of the message it appears to convey. After all that intrigue and complexity, you wonder, it this really what it was all about? And the film's answer appears to be, "Well, of course, what did you think?"

The title, 'Azor' is translated as a code for, 'Be quiet'. The main characters rarely venture beyond the act of listening as they navigate through a maze of pretense and subterfuge that covers a world of arrogance, oppression and evil.

Fabrizio Rongione and Stephanie Cleau as the husband and wife strategize their pathway among the principals of a financial and political junta. Horrible crimes have been committed and an atmosphere of fear laps at the edges of every conversation. The particulars are never mentioned and studiously avoided. In the end we see that everyone who plays a part is fully complicit in a ruthless pursuit of power and greed.

A period piece that visually could have been made in the period that it portrays, the movie drifts from scene to scene, conversation and conversation in what feels like a dream. What is real is never spoken and everything important is hidden behind a curtain of appearance and language.

Summary:

The film tackles a theme rarely used by the cinema: the relationship of private banks with the military, businessmen, diplomats and officials of the last Argentine civil-military dictatorship. And he does it as a kind of thriller and noir (although it exceeds them) that portrays the elegant and above all discreet descent into hell of a Swiss banker who must frequent these estates in the early 1980s in Argentina. And the result is downright disturbing.

Review:

Ivan de Wiel, a private banker from Geneva (Fabrizio Rongione), arrives in Buenos Aires in the early 1980s with his wife Inés (Stéphanie Cléau) because they have lost contact with the partner in charge of the previous region, Kies, about whom they circulate various rumors. His role is to reconnect with the client portfolio and discreetly find out what happened to Kies to clear those rumors.

And what customers! De Wiel will undertake a tour that will include various members, houses and circles of the Buenos Aires upper class (with soldiers, prelates, landowners with stud farms, their wives and lawyers and some upstart), diplomatic personnel and some officials, in a kind of thriller and detective noir (although the film exceeds them), in the context of the military dictatorship.

The banker is faced with a framework in which at first it is difficult for him to position himself. He will act as an explorer in an elegant jungle where he must meet some sinister characters and a plot of things not said or half said, going down a descent into hell with "discretion as strategy" (in the words of its director), where the main objective will be to recover or preserve clients and businesses and where the title of the film, an expression of a Swiss dialect, will end up acquiring its full meaning.

The young Swiss director Andreas Fontana (who later trained in Buenos Aires) performs in his debut film a great reconstruction of the period (in every sense) in terms of the places that the protagonist must frequent, beginning with that Swiss marriage whom he hosts in the Plaza Hotel (and of course, not the Sheraton, a new rich Americans hotel) and tackles a topic rarely seen in the cinema: the relationship between private banks and the military, businessmen and officials of the last Argentine civic-military dictatorship. The film paints at the same time a portrait of this upper class in love with his possessions and proud of his silly Francophilia. At the same time, he makes powerful use of what is not shown, of "blind spots", of the off-field, resources that are very significant in times and contexts such as those he portrays.

And the result is downright disturbing.