The Secret in Their Eyes

City Paper Grade: C+

by Shaun Brady

PRIVATE EYES: Benjamín Esposito plays a man obsessed with a 25-year-old case in the Oscar-winning The Secret in Their Eyes.

[ City Paper Grade: C+ ]

When not making films in his native Argentina, Juan José Campanella maintains a busy sideline helming TV shows like House and Law and Order: Special Victims Unit. He combines those two worlds in The Secret in Their Eyes, which often feels like an overwrought L&O episode inflated to feature length with melodramatic flourishes and political pretensions.

That it won this year's Oscar for Best Foreign Language film should come as no surprise; this is exactly the sort of elegantly mounted, graciously self-important thriller that the Academy loves. Sprawling over 25 years, the story centers on a 1974 rape and murder that has weighed on the mind of criminal court investigator Ricardo Darín (Benjamín Esposito) ever since. Deciding to tell the tale in novel form, he reconnects with an ex-boss and almost-lover (Soledad Villamil), seemingly hoping to rekindle their never-consummated romance as he finally lays the case to rest.

Darín's dissatisfaction comes not from an unsolved mystery, but from justice unserved. Having promised the victim's husband that he would put the killer away, he is forced to watch as the psychopath is released due to political string-pulling and petty bureaucratic vengeance. Campanella employs the crime thriller to explore the ways in which one's obsessions can both fill and empty a life. But, perhaps too inured to the attention spans of viewers distracted by commercials, the director hammers those points repeatedly and relentlessly. Key lines — especially those about leading "lives full of nothing" — recur with the regularity of a song's chorus, and are emphasized like yellow highlighter, making an absurd climax nearly predictable.

Feigning an air of sophisticated restraint, Campanella lunges at every opportunity for spectacle. Witness the acrobatics of the unbroken take that begins as an aerial view of a soccer stadium, swoops into a close-up, and then breaks into a hand-held chase scene, all without a single cut — it's Notorious plus Touch of Evil, but serves little purpose other than calling attention to itself. Even the secretive passions announced by the title are played with yearning stares about as repressed as close-ups in a telenovela.