One of the compelling illusions about life is that things happen for a reason. We have this deep-seated need to find purpose in life, to take the scattered jumble of pieces that confront us on a daily basis and try to reassemble the puzzle, fearing as we do that which seems random, mysterious and ultimately, unknowable. Thus we impose order on our world, and when we reflect on our lives, we can't resist the temptation to construct narratives in which motives are assigned and certain crossroads are conveniently sketched out out. Such is the construct of memory.
A few weeks ago I had coffee with a friend who I first met in college over twenty years ago. Ours had not been a long-term friendship that could be characterized as fellowship or "brotherhood", and instead, was limited to greeting each other from time to time on campus and chatting briefly in the few classes we shared. I detected in him something of the same feeling of dissatisfaction with our chosen career, someone who knew that the world was a more vibrant and challenging conundrum than that offered by a circuit diagram. After graduation, we lost contact with each other and, as I found out afterward, our lives took different turns. Years later when we met again it seemed as if we were able to seamlessly resume a friendship that was motivated in large part by a shared nostalgia for the mutual friends and for the feeling of being young and dynamic but also disaffected and curious, when we were both in our early 20s. To be truthful, we found ourselves at that mid-life crossroads and, despite the different turns in our lives, it has been the basis for a new friendship.
My friend told me during our chat about an Argentinian film called "El secreto de sus ojos", one that had obviously impressed him greatly. It is a recent film, and was nominated for an Academy Award for foreign-language films. He stressed what a visceral impact it had on him, and perhaps because of its melancholic quality, as well as a story that seemed to stress the possibility of overcoming the burden of memory, he though it would appeal to me. He was right.
The film narrates a fictional story of an investigator named Benjamin Espositio who is obsessed with a homicide case that reached an unforunate end. A young woman by the name of Liliana Colato is found murdered, and in the course of his investigation, he is forced to come to certain truths about his own life. Esposito is a middle-aged man who seems to find himself disengaged from life, going through the motions of a career that seems to offer little satisfaction. He is jarred into the present by the arrival of a new official, a young woman named Irene Menendez Hastings, who has obtained a doctorate in jurisprudence from the US and is assigned to head the department. He is obsessed with her, but unable to act on this impulse, and he transfers this obsession to the case at hand.
Liliana was also an attractive woman who would seem to have been happily married. Her brutal murder somehow affects him deeply precisely because of his own unacknowledged interior crisis. In the course of the investigation, aided as he is by a comical subordinate by the name of Pablo Sandoval, he manages to settle on the identity of the supposed culprite, a man named Gomez. During this pursuit, which ocassions certain comical episodes as well as not-so-comical confrontations, he is left to meditate on the nature of obsession, and this obsession takes the form of a novel which he writes and which he shares with Irene. The movie, as it happens, transpires by juxtaposing two historical moments, that of the mid 70s when the case first occurred, and twenty years later, when Esposito has retired and has all the time in the world to look back and to reflect on a case that was not successfully resolved.
It seems as if there are certain emotional needs that have never been resolved for the main characters as well. What would seem to have been a straightforward murder mystery is one that is sidetracked to investigate instead the way in which we all humans blind themselves to the patterns that characterize us. If investigators make use of the concept of a "tell", an physical sign that reveals inauthenticity, then we are left to ponder the opposite, to ponder if there are signs that are hallmarks of truth, devoid of any ambiguity. The conceit in this movie is that the eyes and, in particular, the gaze is an indication of such a connection, of a truth in need of acknowledgement. And what we have are characters who are unable to acknowledge the truth of their own needs, and the fact that, despite belonging to different generations and different social classes and different psychological characters, Esposito and Irene are madly in love.
The murdered woman, Irene, would seem to have found a husband who reciprocated her own deeply-felt obsession. Her husband, a man by the name of Morales, seems devasted by the news of her murder, and insists on carrying forward with the investigation even when the leads, pointing as they do to the involvment of a childhood friend by the name of Gomez, have grown cold. This obsession, that look of devastation, that idea of time having halted for this man who has lost a wife, haunt the investigator through the intervening years, and he will find himself returned to his department and reaching out to Irene as he embarks on his own journey through the labyrinths of time and memory. And given that memory is an unstable terrain that can easily dissolve underneath one's feet as we reflect on how we all share an elemental need to erect a fiction that will comfort us, we find ourselves sharing in the mystery of a dilemma that remains unresolved, one in which we wonder if haunted people will be able to purge themselves of their ghosts.
And this movie does indeed take a devastating turn when things would seem to have been concluded in a messy fashion. It seems that the guilty man is freed, and justice is, indeed, another quimera that escapes capture. Gomez confesses and is jailed but is then freed, Esposito's sidekick Sandoval is brutally murdered, and the main characters are also left to wonder at how to carry on with, as Esposito expresses it, the charade of an empty life. Is there any conviction that will allow them to find the road out of the respective emotional labyrinth in which they find themeselves?
The ending is gruesome, and it offers a troubling vision of the depths to which obsession and the search for justice may lead. We all write our own fictions, but at a certain point, fiction can be paralyzing because it contributes precisely to a sense of stasis, to the illusion that we can retrace our steps and avoid the feeling of crushing regret that affects so many of us, as if by having made other choices, we would have avoided the endless certainty of new misteps. And in this way, perhaps the ending seems a little too sentimental for me because it conforms one again to old Hollywood formulas (indeed, these are old human verities) of the classic "boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl" story. If is a thin veneer that coats the truly frightening aspect of this story, that which will leave the spectator haunted, and which resides in the fates of Morales and Gomez.
Memory perhaps can be prison, but we all need our fictions to convince us of the possibility of escape.
Eternal Observer -- ORomero (c) 2013
Copyrights ORomero 2013
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