AWARDS:
WINNER: 82nd Annual Academy Awards USA: Best Foreign Language Film
WINNER: 2009 Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences of Argentina: 12 Categories Including Best Film, Best Director, Best Actor, Best Editing
SYNOPSIS:
Winner of the Academy Award Winner for Best Foreign Language Film, THE SECRET IN THEIR EYES is a riveting Argentine thriller spiked with witty dialogue and poignant love stories, interweaving the personal lives of a state prosecution investigator and a judge, with a manhunt spanning twenty-five years. Recently retired criminal court investigator Benjamin (Ricardo Darin), decides to write a novel based on a twenty-five year old unresolved rape and murder case, which still haunts him. Sharing his plans with Irene (Soledad Villamil), the beautiful judge and former colleague he has secretly been in love with for years, Benjamin’s initial involvement with the case is shown through flashbacks, as he sets out to identify the murderer. But Benjamin’s search for the truth will put him at the center of a judicial nightmare, as the mystery of the heinous crime continues to unfold in the present, testing the limits of a man seeking justice and personal fulfillment at last.
REVIEW:
Director Juan Jose Campanella SAME LOVE, SAME RAIN,and SON OF THE BRIDE) is one of Argentina's most communicative storytellers. Not for nothing has Campanella shot 16-odd episodes of "Law of Order," whence the unusual idea of setting a thriller in the marbled halls of Argentina's state prosecutors' offices, amid the comings and goings of high court judges and the cynical banter of lawyers Benjamin Esposito (Ricardo Darin) and his alcoholic best friend Pablo (comic Guillermo Francella).
One day in 1985, new judge Irene Menendez Hastings (Soledad Villamil) turns up. A beautiful sophisticate with a degree from Cornell and family connections, she instantly steals Benjamin's heart. His secret love for her across an unspoken class gap is a source of underlying tension throughout the film. Campanella and co-scripter Eduardo Sacheri open the story 25 years later, when Benjamin is a white-haired retiree who has decided to write a novel about a horrific case he can't get out of his mind. He visits Irene, now some kind of chief judge, in his old office to get her reaction and discuss the case. Flash back to the brutal rape and murder of a young woman married to a quiet bank employee (Pablo Rago). Two workmen arrested by the police are beaten into a false confession, much to Benjamin's disgust. Through obstinate persistence, he tracks down the real murderer to his family home and corners him in a breathtaking, swooping-camera chase through a football stadium that is one of the film's highlights.
The excellent cast is led by the strongly centered Darin, who plays a double role: a man in the prime of life frustrated with his work and unable to capture personal happiness, and an older man looking back and analyzing what went wrong. Villamil, the young star of SAME LOVE, SAME RAIN (Darin is in that film as well), makes a wonderful love interest -- she's also fast-thinking, smart and courageous, though it takes her the whole film to break out of the social cage she has been trained to inhabit. Playing Benjamin's deadbeat colleague, Francella adds just the right dose of bad jokes and barroom irony. hollywoodreporter
