The beginning of a movie is key, and it's hard to forget as you watch the rest.
Finding the tone and energy of a movie in the first scene
is very important.
There are two storylines in The Secret in Their Eyes,
a love story and a detective story.
They don't function on the same level.
You could say the love story is the main storyline,
the one that drives the entire movie.
And in musical terms, it's the tone, the main theme.
The detective story is the trigger.
lt doesn't drive the plot, but rather triggers what happens.
lt's the secondary theme in terms of importance, but the dominant one.
lt's the MacGuffin, as Hitchcock would say.
Here we are in the first scene.
We decided that this scene had to be about the love story.
lt may be the most important moment, the one he remembers best,
the one that broke him.
lt's repeated at the end of the second act,
bringing us into the present.
This scene also had to have characteristics
related to memory, as both storyline and theme.
Memories start to take shape here.
People remember only specific details, the rest is blurry.
We can remember a person's eyes,
a person's tone when they told us something important.
Everything else around us was like a brush stroke of color
or a blurred movement.
That's kind of the esthetic of this scene.
lt's an important scene because memories start to take shape in it.
We didn't want it to end at a natural ending point,
but rather to be suddenly interrupted so we could move on to the story.
This tells us that the author was imagining or remembering what we just saw.
This sequence of Esposito writing
and starting the novel in various ways
is a sort of overture of the movie.
ln it, we can touch on all the themes, storylines, and especially the tones
found within the movie.
The main tone
isn't nostalgic, but rather melancholy.
A romantic tone hovers over the entire movie.
But there's also... Coming in right here
is a tone and storyline from a memory that is exceedingly
generous in its recollection.
His memories almost seem like commercials.
The highlights, everything is very soft,
lyrical, smiling.
But the character chokes on this memory and finds it completely ridiculous.
However, the image of this girl, Liliana Coloto, alive,
which is something he can only imagine, is very present in it.
The other storyline and tone of the movie come in here.
Please, don't...
Please, please...
We know that this is a painful memory for him,
that plea he was unable to answer.
ln those four minutes, we introduced all the storylines.
l'm going to talk a lot about the energy in a film,
the energy curve of the tones.
lt's more important to talk about than the plot,
which you either get or you don't when you see the movie.
There's no need for us to talk about that.
This is the end of that introduction.
A man and his memory.
A sort of prologue.
l FEAR
The first act starts here.
The movie could have easily started here.
ln terms of the plot,
nothing we saw before this matters
because it will all be explained and narrated in a linear fashion.
But as viewers, we are already somewhere else,
especially in terms of tone and energy.
lf the movie had started here, it would've been a more conventional story,
and we would've been required to participate in the movie
in a much more conventional manner,
without emotional or energetic involvement.
The gates have opened.
One of the major decisions in the movie was how to treat the past and the present
in terms of color.
Every scene contains a hidden or possible cliché,
and we have to determine what that cliché is
so we can avoid it as much as possible.
The cliché in a movie set in both the present and the past
is that everything in the present is colorful and alive,
while the past is black and white or sepia.
We wanted to do exactly the opposite,
not only to avoid doing what everyone does,
what we've seen so many times,
but also because, since this is a movie about memory,
the past has color, too.
We don't remember the past in black and white, but rather in color.
But the dominant colors in the scenes we remember are simpler.
ln the present everything is similar,
everything is somewhat faded, even.
We're all watching the same scene, yet if we had to close our eyes
and describe the colors we see, we wouldn't remember it.
ln memories, though, we always assign a color to every object.
Here in the present, we work with colors
that are quite muted and diluted,
with a softer palette.
The only exception is the reds
that abound in lrene's world.
lt's in her clothing, in the flower and in the curtains.
The color red is a link,
the only link between the lrene of the present and the lrene of the past.
This is true from both a thematic perspective and a color perspective.
We'll see lrene's penchant for reds in the past as well.
l don't know why.
lt's been on my mind.
Our first little visual effect of the movie is here.
The logo of the café that brought us coffee that day
was on those cups.
We had to erase them on the computer.
That's just a taste of all the visual effects
in the movie that are coming up soon.
There are 1 09 takes with effects in the movie, not including the stadium scene.
Here, let me.
l can't...
lt weighs a ton.
There is a strong chemistry between Soledad Villamil and Ricardo Darín.
We discovered this in Same Love, Same Rain,
and it's apparent to anyone who has seen that movie.
Though these actors get along just fine professionally,
we've all worked together for many years,
they're not lifelong friends who hang out all the time or anything.
As soon as we started working, the friendship, the chemistry between them
was obvious, like in this scene.
lt makes any dialogue you could possibly write
to demonstrate the love between them banal and superfluous.
lt's glaringly obvious in the way they look at each other.
Miss lrene Menendez Hastings.
"Hastings."
We can see here that the skin tones are more prominent.
The red she's wearing is a link to the past.
But we can also see that the green tones are intensified,
the red tones are intensified.
The color of the wood in the courts is almost fiery.
This is where Guillermo Francella comes in.
For those of you watching who aren't from Argentina,
he's a huge star in our country.
He's a very popular person and a very famous actor
best known for his comedic work.
We decided to introduce him to the audience gradually,
so that his mere appearance wouldn't provoke laughter or exclamations
or shift the weight of the plot.
We saw him out of focus in the last scene.
Here, we see his hands, his profile, his back, slightly out of focus.
And soon we'll see him in his entirety.
This allowed us to moderate all the, "Look, it's Francella!"
that might've been heard in the theater.
Hi, fellas.
Good morning.
Ma'am, did a saint die this morning?
Shooting in 235:1 , or wide-screen format,
eliminates the need for establishing shots.
ln each shot, the characters, the architecture,
everything around us is important.
That's a huge advantage of this format
over a square television format
or even the wide-screen format of HDTV,
which, with an aspect ratio of 1 6:9, is much wider than this one.
Well, l may dress like a toad...
lt was easy to work with Guillermo Francella
in the sense that he's a great actor and things come easily to him.
But the approach we took with him... The word "energy" comes up again.
This character's energy tends to take him to his desk
to hide behind all those stacks of files,
to use the act of binding case records
or going downstairs as a crutch, and to use subtle, low-key irony,
energetically low-key, that is, instead of open farce.
Ask Judge Fortuna.
l want a solution, not two problems.
Why is asking me a problem?
lt's not that. lt just seemed silly...
To bother you with...
A small detail, the person typing in the back was a mistake.
The typewriter in front of him that's blocking his hands
was actually another computer effect.
The man was typing at the desk, but he didn't have a typewriter.
No one noticed during filming.
Here, the tone between these two characters is deliberately humorous.
The humor is very dry.
They even tell jokes as we go down the corridor.
There's a point where lnspector Baez makes a witty remark.
Here. That made people laugh in the theater.
We're entering a world you could almost call comedic.
lt's the comedy of work.
Everything is emphasized so that what comes next,
the character's shock, is experienced by the audience as well.
We're not just showing it to them, they feel it, too.
So we arrive laughing...
The tone changes radically, not only for him, but also for us.
Because we're experiencing it firsthand, we can understand
the shock the character experiences when he sees
that exposed, fragile, mutilated body.
This moment triggers everything that happens next and changes his life.
This part was filmed with dialogue.
You could hear the lnspector's voice and that of the coroner,
brilliantly played by Ricardo Cerone.
There was almost black-humor dialogue here
where they acted as though handling this corpse were an everyday thing.
l decided to cut this dialogue in editing.
l wanted everything to be out of focus
and to concentrate solely on Esposito and the dead woman,
on the connection between them.
The old lady mentioned...
two builders working on the terrace in number 3...
We also had takes where you could see Gioia, Baez, speaking in focus,
but l decided to go this route.
-See you later, Esposito. -l'll go with you.
Morales' character, the widower, comes in here.
Of all the characters,
we had the hardest time deciding how his reactions should be.
There are obviously two sides to his personality,
two conflicting and apparently very antagonistic sides.
On the one hand, there's the passionate love
that will make him imprison himself his whole life.
His life ends right here because of that passionate love.
On the other hand, there's the cold, methodical personality
that leads him to formulate a very difficult plan
and maintain a silence and lifestyle for 25 years without giving himself away.
We opted for this approach, which Pablo Rago is doing here,
and which he does extremely well.
lnstead of a person who breaks down crying and screaming,
which might be more normal, more real,
we see a person who is breaking apart inside,
a person whose pain is accompanied by a sort of coldness,
a person whose eyes are making a decision.
Right now, his eyes are saying, "l'm going to catch that man."
We transition with memories here.
We thought that it was the details people remember,
like a kettle whistling.
And from Esposito's perspective, perhaps,
all he saw in that scene was Morales' back and the steam from the kettle.
-Who will want it? -Just get it out of my sight.
Here we start setting up the running gag, the typewriter.
l, Criminal Judge Raimundo Fortuna Lacalle...
hereby declare myself...
This composition, which 235:1 allows, is wonderful.
Playing with different shots.
The connection between them starts here.
We start to see other facets of lrene's highly efficient character.
She can pick up on an office joke.
...legally-speaking, insane...
You'll see this type of framing from below a lot in the movie,
with many elements in the foreground blocking our view.
The purpose of all this was to make us, as viewers, feel like we were hiding
in a corner of this office, trying to see what was going on.
This adds the element of spying on the story,
of looking over the characters' shoulders.
As a result, we get even more involved
because we're trying to find out what's going on.
Benjamin, just to show you Court 1 8 is acting in good faith...
remember you were upset the other day over getting a case?
Well, the case has been solved.
Two builders working in number 3.
They're under arrest in the 25th.
Whenever you have a chance...
ln this scene, we start to see two of the great discoveries in the movie.
Mariano Argento, playing Romano,
and Mario Alarcón, playing Judge Fortuna Lacalle.
He won all the courts' unofficial awards
as the most real and believable character in the movie
according to people who work in the courts.
Esposito, how are you?
Here we have a different color palette, the color of memory.
Everything is forced, everything takes on a greenish hue
when we look outside, that fluorescent light.
And here, as we walk in, everything takes on a reddish hue.
A strong red. We transition from daylight,
which is colder and clearer, to the light of a catacomb.
A dangling light bulb.
Here we see that transition occur faster.
Outside the cell, the cold fluorescent light we see there,
and inside, a deep red
illuminated by an incandescent bulb.
He's Caceres.
Caceres.
lt's okay.
You see that mixture of cold light and warm light a lot
in the corridors of the courts, like in this scene.
The courts are designed with this huge skylight in the middle,
in the hollow you see outside the corridors, which we'll see now.
lt provides a lot of white daylight,
but that light falls right in the middle of the corridor,
to such an extent that the offices require artificial lighting.
As a result, there's that constant mixture of hot and cold in the courts,
of cold light in the middle of the corridor, which we enhance and make green,
and the artificial light in the offices, which we make red.
There's a constant mix.
We can even see it in the characters' faces,
almost green here and almost red there.
lt's a very distinct mix that's quite noticeable in the courts
and it gives us this atmosphere of simultaneous interiors and exteriors.
lt allows us to create an atmosphere of simultaneous day and night.
lt's a very interesting mix.
Now we go to the dive bar.
The dive bar was filmed right on Paseo Colón,
which is where it would actually be.
We had to install double-pane glass in all the windows
so we could film the scene and so the street noise
wouldn't interfere with the sound recording.
And everything you see out the windows was done by computer, too.
We didn't have control over the street,
so the cars that would be driving by would be modern cars, of course.
We had to put green screens in all the windows
and make the set later by computer
with the cars we wanted to insert.
The cars that drive by are just photos of cars driving by,
they're not 3D cars or anything.
Sandoval's drunkenness...
We really didn't want to fall into the cliché of a drunk with Guillermo.
He's an alcoholic,
a serious alcoholic who is used to covering up his drunkenness.
He's a guy who makes deliberate moves.
Look at the way he gauges the ground, he knows where he's going to put his foot.
Once he knows, he slowly gets up.
He's not feeling his way with his foot, stepping in 20 different places.
You're his wife and this is his home.
Back to 2:35, which allows
for a more interesting frame,
the ability to have two planes of action at the same time.
-You brought him like this. -You mean it's my fault?
Here we'll see another extreme case of the mixture of light,
of fluorescent light with a very warm atmosphere.
Everything surrounding the case, that is, surrounding the photos of Liliana,
is a cold light during filming
and made green in color correction.
Outside of that area, everything is very warm and red.
-Who is it? -Benjamin Esposito.
-Who? -From the courts, remember?
We're back to Pablo Rago's acting approach.
We have to constantly plant the seed of the ending
so it seems inevitable and believable, yet unpredictable at the same time.
We really had to gauge to what degree
we should show
this character's rejection of the death penalty, for example.
Some people were critical of the fact that Esposito, and l quote,
"Esposito knew who the killer was because he saw him in the photos."
l'd like to comment on this.
Anyone who has worked with police officers and people from the courts,
who is used to dealing with those types of people,
begins to develop an instinct.
This instinct is very difficult to describe and to explain.
ln a later scene, Esposito says, "l don't know how l know."
Also, what Esposito sees here isn't the murderer,
but rather a suspect, something strange.
As a guy with 25 years of experience,
he sees something that seems abnormal in his world,
a world in which he has seen many cases like this
and many photos like this.
This is by no means beyond the realm of the credible.
No one with experience in this kind of work,
in courts or the police, had any problem with it.
lt's just a comment made by those who perhaps aren't familiar with
that world and how it operates.
Those are from when she was 1 7 or 1 8.
That's the spring picnic...
in Chivilcoy. Ever been there?
lt's also completely related to the theme of the movie,
which is that the eyes speak.
The intention behind the camera operation
and the choice of shot sizes in the movie
is that if we listened to the dialogue with our eyes closed,
we'd be listening to one movie.
Now, if we muted it and saw only the characters' eyes,
we'd be watching a different movie.
There is always a huge difference between what the characters say
and what their eyes reveal that they're thinking.
lt's a fundamental and recurring theme in the movie
that you'll see in full in the next scene, where this theory is presented.
lt guided the camera design in the movie.
Later on, we'll see shots of only eyes
where we were able to isolate the eyes by framing them with different things.
-Do you know who this is? -Let me see.
He's in several. Looking at her.
l showed Liliana this system. Otherwise years pass and you forget...
This is the end of the first act, in which we introduced all the characters and conflicts,
and perhaps even the antagonist.
We end the act with the movie's leitmotif,
an extreme close-up shot of the eyes,
the first one in the movie.
We could say that the curtain falls on the first act.
We come back to desaturated colors.
Well?
l always thought the photo thing was crazy.
Yeah, but l think...
lt's the look in their eyes.
That's the key.
lrene's character reveals nothing of her life,
but her eyes tell us everything.
lt's worth watching.
They bullshit too.
They should keep quiet.
Sometimes it's better not to look.
-What? -We never talked about this case.
When did you come from Jujuy?
ln '85.
Why now?
lt's better than planting begonias.
Why?
Because l've been sidetracked for over 20 years.
Esposito will say, "l know it doesn't happen to you."
And lrene, without doing anything, responds with her eyes.
lt's a truly great bit of acting.
lt's as though she were shouting, "No, you're wrong. lt does happen to me!"
...and l saw myself...
having dinner alone...
and l didn't like myself.
l know it doesn't happen to you.
l'm not asking you to understand, but believe me.
And in trying to...
find the reasons...
the moments...
Everything, absolutely everything leads me to Morales.
lt's as if my life had...
-Answer it. -lt's Alfonso, l'll call him back.
-Answer it, l'll wait. -l'll call him back.
lt's no problem, answer it.
Hi.
l'm finishing up here, l'll be right there.
Start without me...
And we return to the past.
Hello?
Good evening. Does lsidoro Gomez live there?
Yes.
Some might think this scene violates the code of the movie
since everything is from Esposito's memory
and he isn't in this scene.
But not everything he remembers is something he experienced firsthand.
Others told him things, too, of course.
We assume that Morales called him the next day
and said, "Look, l called Gomez's mother, and she said this and that."
So there's no reason he couldn't have imagined or described this scene.
Do you know where l can find him? Have you got an address?
This job is pretty urgent.
The progression of Pablo Rago's character,
the way his methodical side
initially tries to control the scene
while his passionate side gradually overtakes him,
is great acting.
Filming this scene with cuts would've ruined it.
What type ofjob is it?
lt's...
a job that will interest him.
lt's for Councilman Mendez and...
His performance builds up
such that you need to watch the whole process develop
to appreciate the greatness of the moment, to appreciate his skill as an actor.
They used to see each other. She's from here.
Why?
To help us concentrate better on the scene,
Gomez's wife, l mean Gomez's mother, was on the phone
in the apartment next to where we were filming,
and they were actually having this conversation we're hearing.
He'll be glad to hear that.
Really? Do you think he'll remember her?
Oh, yes.
He really liked that girl.
But then she moved away...
to Buenos Aires, and they never saw each other again.
Hello?
lf he's here...
it's a miracle. Schmuck.
-lmagine losing the love of your life. -Not him, you.
lf you'd kept your mouth shut and called me first...
Morning. We're looking for...
lsidoro Gomez.
What is it? Who are you guys?
Mike Hammer, asshole.
-Did he come to work? -No, he didn't.
We know nothing about him.
Get me his address.
Right away.
Fernandez! Fernandez!
There's a character moment here...
What would've been a simple transition scene...
l liked closing Baez's character with a disappointment,
not so much because Gomez got away,
but because he wasn't the one who figured it out, who did his job.
lt's like he's realizing he's not good enough.
Here, thanks to 2:35, we can do a frame composition
totally different from what the golden section would be.
The characters are on the left side of the frame, not the right,
and this gives us the sense that everything here is wrong.
They have no control over the situation. They're powerless.
lf you think l'll do all that paperwork to issue a request...
The exact same thing happens here.
The character should be on the right side of the frame.
Both characters should be on the right side of the frame.
lnstead, the image is composed
contrary to what the standards of comfort, beauty and balance would dictate.
These characters are clearly out of balance.
The chair the judge is sitting in,
with the scales ofjustice behind him, is actually from the courts.
l don't think any art director would've thought to put it in there.
lt would've seemed excessive.
Anyway... the general said what he had to.
Oh, well.
The premeditated movement again, the hand looking for the glass.
The hand that considers where the glass is first,
calculates its movement and then takes it,
instead of grasping at the air like your typical drunk in a movie.
Morales is getting worse every day...
the murderer knows we're after him...
my judge is a moron...
l want to kill lrene...
This is another frame composition that deviates from the norm.
Usually, the largest element in the shot,
in this case Francella's face,
would be in focus, and the other element would be smaller.
lf you wanted to see Ricardo speaking in focus,
you'd try to frame him so that Francella's character would be
way to the right, we'd see from his glasses forward
and we'd see Ricardo's face clearly.
This way, we not only stuck to our intention of conveying,
subliminally, that the characters have no control over what's going on,
but the passive attitude of Francella's character,
who is listening, listening,
also starts to take on a dramatic weight
that is far more powerful than if he were a mere reference.
Also, the characters are together 1 00%, there's no distance between them.
They're in this adventure together.
l gotta pee.
Hold on.
The old lady has to come out at some point.
Too much Napoleon Solo and Perry Mason. That's your problem.
Again, we have a mixture of red, like the upholstery in the car,
and the daylight, which is green.
All the elements... You can see the shopping bag.
All the red elements
contrast with the green of the daylight.
ln this scene we're about to watch,
you'll be able to see the reds
and that palette of reds and greens, but taken to its fullest expression.
This was all set to suspenseful music.
Your typical suspenseful music.
The sound engineer, José Luis Díaz, composed a soundtrack
with all the sounds one might hear in a small town like this.
The girl practicing piano in the distance.
There was actually a kindergarten next to this house.
When we did the sound mixing,
we decided to take out the music
and just play around with sounds.
l think that decision really did a lot for the scene.
Here, we take red and green to the extreme.
Almost all the elements in this scene
fall within the range of one of those two colors.
There are two ways of reaching a suspenseful climax,
like when Sandoval's character is walking in and we think it's someone else.
You can accelerate the rhythm with music, like this...
That would be the conventional way. Or you can do what we did here,
which is to slowly remove all the background noise
until you can't hear anything.
You don't notice it. lt's very subliminal.
You'll notice it now.
But it produces the same feeling of crescendo and expectation
as an actual musical crescendo.
Here we can see two great actors
capable of combining anguish,
realism and comedy in one scene.
We'll let them act.
The letters.
The letters, but no... Come here.
There's no address.
The envelopes are gone. There's no address.
-This one's from the other day. -So?
lt's recent.
The trash.
Having them in the same frame is unbelievable.
No, nothing here.
The layout of this house was truly heaven-sent.
Being able to stand in a doorway
and see the depth of the entire house was incredible.
lt was a real find by Federico Noejovich, our location production manager.
What is it?
Go on, go on.
What is it? What?
Come here. Calm down, l'll let you out.
l swear that no animal was harmed in the making of this movie.
That was done by computer.
Want me to drive?
The dog probably had rabies, you're gonna die.
Why didn't you keep watch? lf she finds out we broke in...
Benjamin, as soon as...
More great timing by Guillermo and Ricardo.
Let's enjoy this because it's rare.
You weren't stupid enough to bring them, were you?
And what if l did?
What if? What if?
lf she finds out, she'll tell Gomez and the guy will disappear for good.
-Don't you see? -No.
You don't? You're fucking blind!
Because you...
You'll see, when l finally figure out the whole thing out about the date...
l'd much rather work alone!
Here we'll see that perspective again
of hiding in a corner
and observing everything from there, through the objects.
The shot starts up above so we see all the letters spread out,
but we gradually start to take the perspective of one person
and we don't change it with cuts or anything.
This makes us feel like we're there.
When we have to move our head to see around a lamp
or past a stack of files, we're becoming involved in the movie.
People from Chivilcoy.
Here, let me see. Oh, shit...
Sperm Bank, loan department. Good morning.
No, it's a sperm bank. Deposit or withdrawal?
-Esposito. Sandoval. -Wrong number.
Sandoval.
l love using the full width of the frame in 2:35,
having characters in both points of the frame.
This is a sequence shot where we also see the red and green in full.
ln fact, it is in this office, the office of Judge María Gabriela Lanz,
who was kind enough to loan us her court for filming,
that the mixture of greens and reds begins to develop
because everything you see here is part of the set.
You can see the green upholstery with the red wood, for example,
which is what inspired the movie's palette.
...that means what l say isn't worth a bucket of shit.
A great job by Mario Alarcón.
This is another scene which gradually develops its humor
in a snowball effect in real time, because there are no cuts.
This wouldn't have been the case
if, for example, we had cut to Ricardo's reaction
to see what was going on.
This works well because we didn't stop in any one shot.
...a black Peugeot was parked...
With a Buenos Aires license plate number 1 33-809...
and my colleague asks the Federal Police...
The presence of Guillermo's character, out of focus,
but in a strategic part of the screen aims to...
He's the edge of a triangle. The judge and Esposito are the base
and Sandoval is at the other apex, drawing our gaze.
We're listening to the judge, but watching Sandoval, even though he's out of focus.
...to?
Sandoval is the audience right now.
He's holding back laughter. We can laugh, but he's holding it back.
This was planned, of course.
...to see if l can clear things up. And the truth is, Esposito, l can't.
Because l don't look like a judge anymore...
l look like a first class fucking idiot.
Because l say l want A and people give me Z.
l can't even watch this scene without laughing.
Excuse me, sir, but...
l think something weird is going on here.
Again, we see...
ln a world where all the characters
wear gray, black and brown,
all colors from a very muted, monochromatic palette,
lrene, by contrast, is always a source of color.
Or that one of them was seen...
tying his shoelaces when he was wearing loafers.
What stood out most was that one of them walked into the grocery store...
greeted them pleasantly...
asked for a bottle of whiskey and left drinking straight from the bottle.
Shall l describe him for you?
We have to deny it, Benjamin.
"lt wasn't me, l don't know..."
Don't ever talk to me again. Never again.
lt may not look like it, but a lot of special effects went into this scene.
These days, all the paint in the courts is peeling.
The paint on those columns in the background is peeling.
lt wasn't like that in the '70s.
Trying to fix all that on the computer created a domino effect of special effects.
For example, we had to reproduce the breath vapor
that comes out of Esposito's mouth,
because when we erased the original color of the columns, the vapor got erased, too.
That sort of thing.
We had to erase a fire extinguisher on a wall,
but then we had to reproduce shadows.
lt's not that easy. You say, "Okay, let's erase it,"
but sometimes you forget that everything in front of that object
also gets erased and then has to be reproduced.
Only one reference to a woman, Rosa, apparently an aunt.
That's it. That's all l've got. The rest is nothing.
-Benjamin. -This is nothing too?
Please.
Leave it open, it isn't private.
l talked to Fortuna.
l explained that you're an imbecile.
l used my irresistible smile...
The use of frame composition again.
The person in control is well-placed, on the left side of the frame...
lt's lrene, with all the space to the right, where it should be.
And the person who is not in control is on the right side of the frame,
in the larger plane, of course.
Of course not. l save it for my boyfriend, as l should.
There's the red element in lrene's clothing.
Right.
l won't take any more of your time.
And bring me the Liliana Coloto file, to seal it and archive it.
The case is closed.
Getting engaged. Kids today laugh at it.
Who gets engaged anymore?
We return to the present
and to pale colors,
except for lrene's red element.
This is a good time to point out Alex Mathews' make-up.
We can all see it
in Ricardo's face,
those perfect wrinkles that stand up to the most extreme close-up,
but also the subtlety of the makeup on lrene's neck.
Those tiny little wrinkles on her neck.
The subtlest thing
around her eyes is really remarkable.
This is complemented by Soledad Villamil's acting, of course.
Her whole attitude changes from the past to the present.
ln the past, she's a girl, a scared rookie in a man's world
who doesn't know how to assert herself,
and who may not have a strong sense of self-awareness.
ln the present, she's a judge in her element
who is used to controlling her territory.
l was another person.
Your novel might be really good.
But it's not for me.
You've reached the end of your life and you want to look back.
But l can't.
l have to go to work every day.
And live with this. lt may not be true justice...
but it's a kind ofjustice.
And at the end of the day l have to go home...
and live with my husband...
and with my children, who l adore.
My whole life l've looked forward.
The past is out of my jurisdiction.
l declare myself incompetent.
What a case, Jesus Christ.
lt never dies.
We filmed this scene in Retiro station in half an hour
because they were practically kicking us out.
lt was a Saturday afternoon, almost nighttime,
and the station was starting to fill up.
This is one of my favorite scenes.
Pablo Rago does an exceptional job here.
l think we get the feeling that he's a man on the verge of madness,
but isn't quite there yet.
For me, this is the most disturbing scene for this character.
Yes.
How are things?
This month l'm here Tuesdays and...
Once again, we see those frames where the layout
and architecture of the place dominate.
lt's a story about two small men in a huge place, teeming with people.
This was one of the images l began the treatment of the movie with.
Looking at Retiro station,
noticing that all these scenes are set in huge places.
We see Retiro station, a huge place
with 1 ,000 or 500 people walking around.
A swarm of people.
What would happen if we could suddenly cut to a close-up of the eyes
of one of those people?
What story would their eyes tell us?
That was the premise for the treatment of the movie.
That combination of huge places and close-ups of eyes.
l think Pablo's expression here adds depth.
We don't know if he's crazy,
if he's serious, if he's human, if he's a man in love...
Then l start having doubts...
and l don't remember if it was lemon or honey in the tea.
And l don't know if it's a memory or a memory of a memory...
Until this point, when we're moved by his pain.
Excuse me.
This is one of my favorite scenes in the movie.
l'm going to say something quickly and let you watch it.
ln this scene, the idea that a person's eyes tell one story
while his words tell another is crucial.
Also, all the storylines are addressed at the same time.
The story of the crime progresses,
the love story progresses,
the story of Pablo Rago progresses.
lt functions on all those levels simultaneously.
Thematically, it's a scene in which all the storylines converge.
-Go on. -Yes.
And l thought...
"l have to talk to lrene."
ln terms of tone, there's romance,
suspense and comedy.
lt's another thing that really fascinated me while making this movie.
To what point can we combine those flavors,
those types of music, those rhythms and those energies
and still have a cohesive and effective product?
Excuse me, ma'am.
l ran into Morales yesterday at the train station.
Know what he was doing?
My crystal ball is broken.
He goes to the terminals every day looking for the killer.
Every single day after working at the bank.
There's also a small detail here of the rose,
which looks like it's on Esposito's lapel.
lt's as if his wife's death just left him there...
stuck in time forever.
You should see his eyes.
They're in a state of pure love.
Can you imagine a love like that?
Unaffected by the wear and tear of the routine?
Speak for yourself, l don't know about that.
We think the guy...
deserves another chance, ma'am.
Where do l come in?
The case is closed.
We'd have to reopen it.
You're asking me to destroy an official document...
with mine and the judge's signature on it...
and to falsify statements and dates...
so it will look like the case is still open?
-That's a brilliant idea. We hadn't... -Don't fuck with me.
l think that the scene we just saw
makes a very strong case for working with actors.
Tell me.
Did you see a stack of letters on my desk?
No.
Sandoval?
He left down Talcahuano.
The case is reopened.
Not only do you sneak off to get drunk, you also steal evidence.
Everything's under control.
Here comes the scene about passion.
Hands off. Are you nuts?
We're going back.
This is actually another system commonly used by police and detectives
for finding missing people.
Learning what that person loves most, what his vices and passions are,
because those things are very hard to change.
For example, if a person is addicted to gambling,
he can drop off the radar, but he'll take that addiction with him.
The same thing happens here, and we draw a sort of metaphor
for the main theme of the movie, passions.
The passions that control us.
And l started thinking about guys.
Guys in general. Not just this guy, but...
Guys in general.
A guy.
A guy can do anything to be different.
But there's one thing he can't change. Not him, not you, not anybody.
Take me, for example.
Great acting by Guillermo Francella...
l have a good job, a wife who loves me...
With Ricardo's reactions,
which are a perfect and subtle emphasis.
"Why are you here, Pablo?"
You know why, Benjamin?
The rhythm of the scene is slow.
The cadenza of this scene is piano,
to put it in musical terms. Pianissimo.
Two scenes later...
l'm saying this because l'll explain why we filmed the stadium scene the way we did.
Two scenes later, we're in an interrogation scene
that lasts about 1 0 minutes.
lt's an intimate scene with just three people,
very little happens, and it's set in an enclosed space.
This scene is the same way.
The energy curve of the movie is going down, down,
and we had to fulfill several functions with the stadium scene.
They had to find the man, of course.
That's the narrative function, its function in the script.
But as viewers, we should also feel a surge of energy at that moment.
l needed to make viewers feel what the characters feel,
anguish and adrenaline.
ln a short span of time...
Like a sandwich,
between two low-energy scenes.
So how do we do that?
We'll see how this scene ends... We'll resume when the stadium scene starts.
"...as Anido with Mesias."
Anido and Mesias, backs on the club that won it all in '61 .
Negri at goalie, Anido and Mesias.
Blanco, Peano and Sacchi. Corbatta, Pizzuti...
Mansilla, Sosa and Belen.
"Don't worry about me. l'm like Manfredini...
not Bavastro." Notary?
Pedro Waldemar Manfredini.
Racing paid peanuts for him and he ended up being...
an extraordinary player. lncredible.
Julio Bavastro, right forward.
Played only two matches between '62 and '63 without scoring.
Quote: "l don't want to end up like Sanchez."
Who's he talking about?
He can only mean the goalie, Ataulfo Sanchez.
Eternal benchwarmer.
He played only 1 7 matches between '57 and '61 .
Notary, what is Racing to you?
A passion.
Even after nine years without a championship?
A passion is a passion.
You see, Benjamin?
A guy can change anything. His face, his home, his family...
his girlfriend, his religion, his God.
But there's one thing he can't change.
He can't change...
his passion.
And here we are.
A movie's energy curve is made up of
moments of harmony and moments of change.
Moments of harmony,
when we maintain the same energy and style,
make us feel at ease.
They make us feel comfortable, like we can follow the story.
But moments of change are the ones that excite us.
They give us a surge of adrenaline and pique our interest.
Too much harmony in a movie is boring. Too much change is incoherent.
We were coming off two intimate scenes and we needed a surge of energy.
We start with the cliché establishing shot of the stadium, which was deliberate.
Usually, viewers are used to going to a cut.
And here, we keep going and going and going
and going and going
and going and we don't stop.
The camera pauses at Ricardo and keeps going.
Those 30 seconds
make us, the viewers, feel like we we're sitting right there.
We're in another world, seeing something else, immersed,
just another fan in the crowd.
We never would've been able to achieve this with a cut.
lt isn't a whim.
lt's the way to achieve, to its fullest,
a sense of involvement in the scene, the surge of energy we feel.
lf we had cut to this, if we had...
Here, for example,
we're a guy standing next to them as Francella says, "There he is!"
We turn our head and start walking behind them.
And the whole time we're just another person in the stadium.
People even bump into us.
Here.
We're just another person.
We were able to do all that because we went from the aerial shot
to the stands without a cut.
And here again,
every time we expect a cut, it keeps going and going.
We're the spectator who went walking the other way and stops next to Gomez,
shouting to the others, "Hey, man, he's over here."
We knew that a lot of people would expect a cut here,
when the camera moves, so we made sure
that either Guillermo or Ricardo were onscreen at all times.
And we start running. We're just another person chasing after this guy.
Gomez! Come back here!
Come back here! Don't run! Come back!
Come back!
Even the camera assumes the attitude we would have
if we were involved in this chase.
Right here, we stay back a little. We lose him, but...
We stay back. We witness this dialogue.
We're the third person running after this guy.
We climb the steps with them,
we stop to hear this argument.
Why didn't you give him the photo?
-l did give it to him! -Go to hell, you motherfucker!
Sandoval says, "There he is," or gestures, and we go with him.
We go to help him.
Can't l take a crap in peace?
We pull back a little because we've invaded someone's privacy.
Here we stop next to him.
Come out!
Fuck off! lt's occupied!
Come on out, the cops are here. Nothing will happen to you.
What police? Quit fucking around.
And when Gomez comes from the other side,
we step back so he doesn't get us.
We escape from Gomez.
We try to see where he went
and not lose sight of the others so we can warn them.
But he comes back and we pull away again.
We don't want to fight this man.
As viewers, that build-up of expecting a cut at any moment,
a cut that doesn't come and doesn't come,
creates a tension, an anguish, a change in the style of the movie
that an intimate scene or arresting him at home
or conventional filming techniques could never have achieved.
Sorry. How's it going?
-l'm waiting for Sandoval. -What for?
l play the nice guy, then he comes in...
l'll explain later, it's a routine we have.
Oldest trick in the book. You can't question him without the judge.
Actually, we have to pull it off before he gets here.
As a transition, we continue as though this were the stadium,
with the camera following the spectators. We're just one of them.
Naturally, we can't end this scene
like the stadium scene,
in a sudden, stylistic cut.
lt has created a lot of energy.
So we continue here in single-camera style,
as though we were the companion looking on.
We ease off a little, gradually,
we start lowering the energy of the rhythm.
Here, in this intimate moment between them, we're ready to cut again, and it cuts.
l don't know.
-See? -l don't know how l know, but l know.
How?
Gomez, lsidoro Nestor.
The interrogation scene was filmed in just one day.
lt's almost 1 5 pages long.
We rehearsed this scene with the actors,
but never on location.
We spent an hour or two that day rehearsing on location.
Félix Monti set up the lighting so that we could film from any angle,
and thanks to digital technology, we were able...
The scene lasted 1 2 minutes before editing.
lt was 1 2 or 1 3 minutes long uncut.
We were able to film it in an almost documentary style.
The actors did the whole scene from here to the end without stopping.
We had two cameras, and we placed them
in different parts of the room every time,
the premise being to follow the action however we could.
That's why the composition is poor at times, why we're searching for focus,
why there are objects
that come between us and the characters.
lt was filmed like a documentary, which gives it a strong visceral quality.
Here Gomez's character is well-composed, the camera is on a tripod,
and Esposito's character is poorly composed,
with a slight trembling of the camera.
This creates a subliminal power dynamic.
Look, Gomez, don't...
You know as well as l do you raped and killed her.
Liliana?
Are you serious?
There's a constant shifting of the axis.
lt's a way of conducting the scene
that makes us feel uncomfortable.
lt makes us feel uncertain.
lt causes stress.
l left because l couldn't afford it.
-And yourjob? -l found one that paid better.
What's that got to do with Liliana?
l've known her my whole life...
she's a friend from my childhood.
The poorly composed character.
They can't find Sandoval.
-What? -They can't find Sandoval.
All the space we saw in the right side of the frame earlier with Esposito,
which made for a poorly composed frame that was missing something,
is now filled in by lrene's presence.
And suddenly, we can see that there's a team.
The frame was poorly composed, now it's well-composed.
The frame was missing something, now it's complete.
Once again, we hide the rest of the face to focus on the eyes.
Look, Gomez.
The judge handling your case...
lt's her attitude more than anything.
The way she averts her eyes
and looks at Esposito.
This is really the turning point for lrene's character.
Here, lrene starts to get a sense of the real world.
Not the world of books
or guidelines or laws,
but rather the world of the true professional, the true artist,
the world of sensations, feelings, intuition.
She doesn't know how she knows either.
Let me see the autopsy.
Hiding.
The Coloto girl...
Here she is. 5 feet 6...
1 28 pounds.
Look what he did to her.
We can say that lrene the judge is born in this scene.
Besides, she was a beautiful woman.
ln mythology, the moment in the story
where the character becomes aware of his destiny is very important.
This is lrene's moment.
You think so?
l mean...
The door wasn't forced.
That means she knew her assailant.
Yes.
But there's no way such a woman would ever remember this twinkie.
Unless she was a hooker.
Some guys you only do for money.
Who is she?
Keep your fucking mouth shut.
No, she was a decent girl, l assure you.
l agree with the kid about that.
She was two-timing that bank clerk for sure.
l'll bet his horns were so big he needed a convertible.
What are you laughing at, retard?
That guy who gave testimony last time.
-Sandoval? -Right. l bet it was him.
He was her lover. Tall, good-looking, broad shoulders.
When you do a scene repeatedly all day, non-stop,
with actors of this caliber,
new things keep cropping up,
small variations that give the scene
an unpredictable quality.
Sometimes you get unexpected reactions,
unexpected ways of saying certain lines.
ln an effort to keep it fresh, which is actually intuitive, it's not an effort,
lots of little gems come up
that the watchful eye, or the watchful editor, has to catch
so they don't end up on the cutting room floor.
Regaining composure a little.
You people are crazy.
Bringing things back together when Gomez was about to lose his calm,
you regain strength, rally the troops.
"The damage to the right parietal bone...
demonstrates the assailant had extraordinary upper body strength."
Look.
Two noodles.
"Likewise, due to the depth of her vaginal injuries...
we may deduce that the assailant was very well-endowed."
Obviously they're not talking about this microbe. He must have a peanut.
There it is, bitch.
A lot of people asked why we showed Gomez's penis,
saying it wasn't necessary.
That's true. From a narrative perspective, it wasn't necessary.
To me, it seemed totally prudish,
from a moral perspective, not to show it.
lf he had taken out a pen or a revolver, we obviously would've shown it.
But also, from the viewer's perspective, feeling what she felt...
For me, the people who were shocked by that shot,
proved, simply by being shocked,
the need to put it in there.
They felt what lrene felt at that moment.
Let go of me!
Touch her and l'll kill you. l'll kill you!
Let go of me!
Again, this is a shot with two small men in a huge swarm of people.
These days, of course, Retiro station is full of kiosks with neon lights,
and a lot of effects went into this shot.
The case appears to be closed. The plot reaches a comfortable point
and it has to move forward.
We have to create new doubts, new questions, new expectations.
At this point,
we're not really sure what this scene is about.
We do know that there are ghosts in his head looking for answers.
-Hello? -Hi, it's me. Did l wake you?
No, l was...
working a bit. Why are you up so late?
l was thinking...
-You don't say. -Yeah, silly.
No, about the novel.
l want to read it when it's finished.
We see that, despite trying to cut herself off
from Esposito in the present,
lrene can't stop thinking about him,
and she tells him she'd like to read his book when he's finished.
Also, she says she's drinking tea because she can't sleep.
We know that she can't sleep because she's thinking about him.
We transition to this scene
and right away, we know what lrene is thinking about
as she drinks her tea 25 years earlier.
...municipalities and public facilities...
located across the country.
She personally delivered clothing, school supplies and candy...
to be distributed...
in Lobos, a village in the province of Buenos Aires.
Also present at the ceremony were...
Hello?
We thought the story was over,
but it isn't.
Not only did it continue, it got worse.
What?
And also, thanks to them, we can achieve...
many things, because people can't do it all on their own.
l won't go into why we chose that time in history
and why we put Gomez behind lsabelita.
lt would just be nice if the doubts, the questions
and the debate that this choice provoked
inspired people who weren't alive then
to open a history book and learn about it.
These two, raising their hands. l want you to get them.
What are you doing here? Are you crazy?
No, you are.
-Ma'am. -We need to talk to you.
Fellas, would you mind?
lf you'd called first, l'd have had coffee ready.
lsidoro Gomez. Rape and murder...
Again, the mixture of daylight outside and the red inside the office
is very evident here.
We checked...
and here we are. Anything to say?
Yeah, sure. That you two need to get out more.
Red elements in lrene's shirt.
This is the real world.
While you two are shooting birds, we're in here...
fighting in the middle of the jungle.
Gomez, Gomez, Gomez...
A shiny blue in Romano's suit.
Positive, brighter. The new Argentina he sees.
What's the problem?
Do you realize what you're saying? He confessed. He's a convicted...
murderer.
Perhaps, but he's also intelligent...
There was an earlier scene in the script, which we actually filmed,
where Romano and Esposito see each other at the courts
and Romano says, "Look, l'm at the Ministry of Social Welfare now.
"Stop by for a coffee sometime."
We took it out because it gave us an idea of what was to come
and because we felt it was too explanatory for Argentineans.
When dealing with history, you're constantly debating
to what degree something is didactic or dramatic.
We decided that the scene was unnecessary
from a dramatic standpoint. lt was purely didactic.
So we ran the risk that it wouldn't be understood
and we took that scene out.
Viewers who don't know what happened at the Ministry of Social Welfare
or what these characters are talking about do understand the important part,
that a paragovernmental group crushed the armed guerrilla movement,
which is where state repression began,
and that it was a group who fed on people like that.
Those who believe otherwise
can take the debate to the historical and political arenas,
not the cinematographic one.
Let her go back to her world.
But if you have a problem with me...
come alone and we'll settle it.
Come on, lrene.
There are
ample sources to support this version.
Neither of you can do a thing about it.
And the descent into hell continues.
The humiliation appears complete, but we still have a long way to go.
This is another scene that,
had we done it with cuts, would've lost all its power.
Or at least some of its power.
The elevator sound that José Luis Díaz found
adds a sort of ghostly element to the scene,
making any other type of musical effect unnecessary.
ln this case, it doesn't get gloomier than reality.
You said life.
Yes...
Morales tried.
And he collaborated with the authorities in everything he did,
giving them all the information he had.
ln this scene,
he decides that he's on his own.
lf l could, what for?
What would l do? What would four bullets get me?
A lifetime in jail.
Gomez goes free without ever serving and l spend 50 years...
stuck in a cell, envying him.
No.
No, life in prison would have been fair.
l wish l could help, but l honestly don't know how.
Who knows?
Some other time...
Anyway.
-l'll get it. -No, please.
lt's just a coffee.
l'm very grateful for everything you've done for me.
l wouldn't have made it this far without you.
l owe you one.
Morales already knows his future here.
l think the major dilemmas, the major dramatic conflicts,
can be boiled down to two things, threats to dignity and threats to life.
Esposito's dignity has been destroyed, tarnished.
He has been humiliated in the eyes of the law,
in the eyes of the woman he loves,
and in his own eyes.
But his life isn't in danger yet.
No, you aren't.
You'd have to be there, but you're here.
Benjamin.
Yes?
How long before you talk to me again?
l talk to you every day.
l'm not untouchable.
Or from another world.
But the case, although it ended badly, is over.
And their lives go on.
So we decided, dramatically,
to pull a sort of sleight of hand
and make viewers believe we were moving in the direction of the love story,
and even in the direction of romantic comedy.
lrene wants to meet up with him,
and clearly
makes a date.
...about my life, my fiancé...
my marriage and anything else related to the case.
We can meet for coffee after work.
Time?
8:30. Place?
-The lmmortals. -The Richmond.
We're back to the energy curve, the tonal curve.
We're coming off a very dramatic moment that caused a lot of anguish
and we're stepping into the light.
We'll play in a major scale again,
to put it in musical terms.
lt seems like this is the direction it'll go in.
Even this minor conflict here which,
in a slightly somber way,
shows us the conflict at that time between a fascist...
We can deduce what the notary's position is.
We can deduce what Sandoval's position is.
But it brings us to a witty remark, something almost funny.
l repeat, we're going to play in a major scale.
Even more so in the next scene.
Arrest the motherfuckers! Show them some fucking justice!
-Fuck you! -My jacket! My jacket!
You're wearing it.
lt was important to see the bar from the front,
because later we'll see Morales watching the building from there.
And this scene borders on the ridiculous.
l must admit, l've never laughed as hard as l did when we rehearsed this scene.
At times like that, you feel privileged
to work with two such actors.
She's never going to answer.
Why?
Because the phone doesn't work.
What do you mean? Put that down.
l told you a thousand times...
The timing of Sandoval's responses...
And you didn't help me.
That was six months ago.
The phone hasn't worked for a year.
The way he moves, deliberately, slowly...
Put that down. Stop touching stuff.
lf you ever...
The timing in this scene is practically anti-comedic.
l wanted to sue them.
Look at me.
-You have a date? -No, no.
You have a date. And l'm leaving.
The last thing l need is you calling me a party pooper.
Too much furniture in here.
-Sit here. -l always run into shit.
Have a seat until you feel better.
Have a seat.
ln short, all this leads viewers to believe that the story will go like this,
"Now he'll hook up with lrene, Sandoval will be around, they'll have an affair, etc."
l'll try to convince your wife not to kill you.
Call her on the phone.
This steers us toward harmony, as l said, between harmony and change.
Mine doesn't work, Benjamin.
Use yours.
Just stay here. Don't touch anything, don't do anything.
l'll be right back.
-Turn off the light. -Yes.
We'll catch that son of a bitch.
We'll catch him.
-We were working all day. -Save it, some other time.
Again, if we were describing a musical composition,
we'd be talking about a modulatory bridge here
because there will be a sudden change in tone.
Actually, not a sudden change in tone,
but rather a powerful change in tone,
an important change in scale.
We're gradually moving from one scale to the other.
Pablo?
-What is it? -l don't know. Pablo?
-Don't scare me. -Wait there.
Pablo...
-No! -What is it? What happened?
l'd like to start talking about the music.
The music we're hearing now isn't bombastic,
it isn't dramatic, but it is tragic.
The music has a hint of requiem,
but it's almost angelic.
This music diminishes, acting as a counterpoint
to this scene's dramatic surge.
-He's gonna go after you. -No, my father knows who to talk to.
That was a brief introduction to the subject of music.
We've reached the last scene of the second act.
His dignity is clearly destroyed, his life threatened.
Everything is a lot worse than when it started,
with no solution in sight.
This was the hardest scene to do in the entire movie.
Finding the right tone.
Although Esposito is remembering this,
and we could therefore have been overly melodramatic,
we needed this scene to work
with our 21 st century sensibility.
We begin with lots of subliminal themes,
for example, we can see that all the actors are wearing colors,
while these two are wearing black and white.
lt has a subliminal hint of the '40s,
two people wrapped up in one of those old romantic movies
in a more modern world.
As for the music...
Both Federico Jusid and Emilio Kauderer can attest to the fact
that we never worked so hard to find the right tone for the music.
ln the first version, we went with melodrama, of course.
lt was very similar to Lara's Theme from Dr. Zhivago
and transformed the scene into something very sappy.
lt didn't work.
The editing also went along with the music, and that didn't work either.
We had a very hard time finding the right balance in the editing
and in the music as well.
ln subsequent versions of the music, l think there were more than 1 5,
we always brought it down, always less and less.
First we took out instruments.
Then we took out crescendos.
The shot we're seeing now was almost removed from the movie altogether
because it always seemed too dramatic, too melodramatic.
l loved it, and we finally found a place for it.
lt took several revisions, several edits,
before we found the right balance
between realism, melodrama and romance.
This isn't a formula, of course,
and the way we found this balance
was by simply trying different things. Trial and error the entire time.
That's how we did it.
End of the second act. The curtain falls.
"With you, the actors,"
as they used to say in an old TV show.
We're playing with memory here again.
We'll never know if that train scene happened the way we saw it
or if Esposito is remembering it differently.
Your house is exactly as l imagined it.
How did you imagine it?
Exactly like this. Exactly like l imagined it.
Sure...
We start with a major key again.
When l say major key and minor key, l'm referring to
a musical explanation of the energy in the movie.
ln a major key, all the notes seem to fall where they're supposed to.
ln a minor key,
there are always one or two notes that fall in an odd place.
They give us a strange feeling. There's stress in the music.
So here we start in a major key and quickly move to a minor key.
...or even believable.
Yes. No. What? lt isn't believable?
lrene's character uses a system of attack
common to courtroom dramas...
From a direction standpoint even...
The lawyer who, using the Socratic method, with yes or no questions,
leads the witness into a trap.
She even moves toward him gradually until he has no way out.
...love she'd never had the courage to confess...
That's what happened. lsn't it?
lf that's what happened...
why didn't you take me with you?
Again, we see lrene the judge, lrene from the interrogation,
in a romantic scene.
Dimwit.
How does the case proceed?
There are no longer any secrets between them, only the impossibility of closeness.
The only thing left to tear down
is that wall.
Or that he came back married to a rich little Jujuyan princess.
She was wonderful.
lt wasn't her fault l could never love her.
lt's a lousy ending.
lt's crap.
You see?
l don't want to miss another chance. How is it possible?
How can l do nothing about it?
l've been asking myself...
for 25 years and l've only been able to come up with one answer.
"Forget it, it was another lifetime. lt's over, don't ask."
lt wasn't another lifetime. lt was this one.
lt is this one.
Now l want to understand.
How can someone live an empty life?
How do you live a life full of nothing?
How do you do it?
A new part of the search starts here,
a search they embark on together.
Just like Sandoval showed the way earlier,
and this time lrene does.
You see? That's his mother.
Sir, we are required by law to notify a change of address.
lt's not something we do because we feel like it. Understand?
-l do now. -Morales, Ricardo.
There's one, two... Four, ma'am.
Let's search by l.D. number.
-What's your first number? -Three, what's yours?
-What do you care? -What? Can't l...?
Here's a five and a six. Morales, Ricardo Augustin.
He changed addresses in 1 975.
Write this down, pata-pata.
There was a new search for color in this scene as well,
a color that doesn't quite fit in the present or the past.
Although we still have color desaturation,
there's a brown, earthy element and an element of scorching sun
that is much more prevalent.
This will be even more apparent when we see
Esposito leaving the Morales situation.
This is where we start to insert little clues
that don't attract attention in themselves,
but make you feel like something isn't quite right,
including the film narrative.
l'll explain when we get to them.
A totally solitary place.
There are no dogs, which is strange for a farm.
There are no dogs, although they could alert someone to the presence of other people.
The man we see in the distance is carrying a tray of things,
which could be strange, or not.
-Quite a surprise. -l know...
We don't draw any attention to the tray, of course.
Morales is uncomfortable. There's a constant tension
between what he feels, which is extreme danger,
and the way he thinks he should appear, which is like a man with no worries.
What problem could cause this man from that time to pay him a visit?
What l was saying about film narrative is coming up.
There is no reason
for the cut that's coming up here.
Him drawing that curtain.
No reason whatsoever.
As viewers, we sense that something strange just happened,
but we can't understand what.
lt's just a hunch that there was something odd
about that cut, and then it passes.
This will all come back, of course.
There's always a branch nobody wants, so here l am...
with a promotion and everything.
lt seems incredible,
but Esposito hasn't even seen a picture of Liliana Coloto in 25 years.
He's seeing her for the first time after 25 years.
Remember Liliana?
He comes face to face with his memory.
ln the shot of the photo, we saw some medical books that we'll come back to.
Still here.
No, l mean single...
-married... -No.
No, really.
l think l just... At that point...
Morales is obviously trying to be as good-natured as possible.
He has no reason to be anything but.
Or at least Esposito shouldn't know that he has a reason.
Yeah, for a while.
But it didn't work.
l don't know if it was me...
lt's complicated.
This scene is set up like a cockfight.
We see two competitors...
We see... We are Esposito,
studying the person we want to get certain information from.
And we'll stay with him
in a sequence with almost no cuts.
lncredible work by Miguel Caram here,
operating the camera. He's the cameraman.
Everything you're about to see was filmed with a hand-held camera.
You'll see cuts to a couple of reverse angle shots,
but the entire sequence was filmed in one take,
from when Morales is reading to when they finish by the door.
We go with him. We're on the attack.
-How do you know? -l just read it.
-They found your friend. -Oh, right.
He's closing him in gradually.
No.
My coworker at the courts.
They came looking for me, didn't find me...
and let him have it.
Bastards.
Gomez was never found, right?
While editing, l studied the possibilities
of not making that cut we just saw, and simply stopping on him.
l decided to leave it.
l decided to let viewers see
that moment of weighing how to proceed...
lt was 25 years ago, Esposito.
l was sure you wouldn't be able to.
But the entire scene, what we're seeing now, was a continuation of the last one,
the camera was approaching with Esposito.
Forget it.
That was the camera moving backward,
but we get that sense
of two opponents in a cockfight coming together and pulling apart.
l don't know what you want me to say.
You didn't care the guy got a free ride.
There was nothing l could do.
You spent a year looking for the guy, they let him go and you do nothing?
l wasted a year looking for him and they let him go!
-What can l do? -That's it?
-Yes! -The rest of your life behind a desk?
-Look who's talking. -You're better than l am.
He closes in on him again. And every time Esposito ups the pressure and approaches,
he escapes.
And he approaches him again.
Your love for that woman... l never saw it again.
ln anybody.
Coming closer every time.
Nobody.
Ever.
Get out of my house.
He pulls back again.
Right now, please.
lt's my life, not yours.
He failed. He needs to rethink his strategy.
Change his angle of attack and with it...
...getting old, that's it.
...we change the camera angle.
That might be it.
l couldn't stop thinking about it.
Go dwell on it at home.
lt seems like he's pulling back slowly, but instead of going out the door...
Gomez didn't kill Sandoval.
He attacks again.
So?
He knew us both.
lf he'd been there, he'd have waited for me.
There's something...
l had a couple of photos at home, of myself.
When Sandoval got killed...
We gradually close the gap between them.
Nothing else had been touched.
l thought...
l think...
Are you Esposito?
Did you hear what l said...
We'll never know if this really happened this way either,
whether Esposito is imagining it
or it's what he needs to believe.
Answer me.
Where are you going?
-Where are you going? -Here.
lt doesn't really matter anyway.
l'm going to put on a record. lt's okay.
A record?
Listen to me.
Are you Esposito or not?
Yes, l am.
Morales obviously didn't know about this.
Now they've both lost a loved one.
Without evaluating the degree of affection
one can feel for a beloved woman or a friend,
this is reflected
in the two of them sharing the frame.
One is a continuation of the other, there's no distance between them.
We used a happy accident here,
seeing Esposito's eyes through Morales' glasses.
Memories are all we end up with.
At least pick the nice ones.
But there's one thing...
l know l'll never forget.
The last thing Pablo said to me the night they killed him.
"Don't worry, Benjamin.
We'll catch that son of a bitch."
And l will.
lf he's alive, l will.
Morales' eye tells us much more
than any words we could shout, or what seeing his whole face or body could reveal.
And Morales does Esposito a favor, the favor he owed him.
He gives him an "answer,"
and frees him from the whole dilemma.
And in a way, he says, or thinks to himself, "There's only room for two in this prison."
The next shot is one of the most complex in the movie in terms of visual effects.
We had no control over the trains, of course.
We had to shoot when the train was going by.
The conditions weren't precise.
The sky you're about to see is fake.
At the factory you see in the background,
there were a number of modern electrical poles that we had to erase.
By erasing them, we also had to erase the reeds behind Morales.
So the reeds you see now are animated.
They're computer-generated.
The train was modern, so we had to create one from that era.
Those three brief shots you saw
were some of the most important and laborious in terms of visual effects.
Here, when Morales leans forward,
we start to give full meaning
to the expression, "the eyes speak."
Was it worth it?
Forget about it.
Forget it.
Who cares?
My wife is dead.
We start with...
Esposito's hazy shoulder obscures Morales' mouth,
leaving only the eyes.
Forget about it, trust me.
You'll end up with only memories.
l owed you one, right?
Now we're even.
The train sequence we saw earlier was the second hardest to edit.
This was the hardest.
Not only for visual, rhythmic and editing reasons,
but also in terms of how we rationed the information.
l have to thank Camilo Antolini, who edited all my past movies,
for solving this with the motif of the four shots.
The repetition of those four shots.
Morales said repeatedly, "They won't get me anywhere."
Ciao.
lt wasn't another lifetime. lt was this one.
A guy can do anything to be different.
What would four bullets get me?
But there's one thing he can't change. Not him...
And the four shots again.
At this point, we didn't have to know what happened,
but we could start setting it up.
Rationing that information was the hardest part of this scene and the movie.
And creating that mood of... Great sound work here.
The scorching sun here again.
Basically, the challenge is to give a lot of information
while maintaining a strong mood.
ln general, information and mood don't mix.
How do you do it?
The music in the last part of the movie is excellent.
lt began when Esposito was in the car
and will go on until he writes the note,
until he corrects the "l fear."
lt's nine and a half minutes of uninterrupted music
that spans all moods, from...
l wouldn't say suspenseful music, but rather Gothic,
captivating, because right now it's hypnotic.
lt's propelling us forward, it has drive.
And it has dramatic changes in key, l'll tell you when,
and tone.
l fucked the shit out of her!
What retribution?
lt's a subtle, excellent arrangement by Federico Jusid.
lt's as if his wife's death...
just left him there, stuck in time forever.
My wife is dead.
Your friend is dead. Gomez is dead too. They're all dead.
They'd give him an injection...
and he'd take a nap.
Nobody, Benjamin.
Let him grow old.
Live a life full of nothing.
How did you start over?
That was 25 years ago.
25 years, Esposito.
Forget about it.
When it seems like the music will rise, it fades.
As the music fades, we move forward, almost physically.
We stand up in our seat, we want to see more,
we want to see better, we want to hear more.
We're alert.
And the music fades even more.
ln one of the first drafts of the script,
when Gomez saw Esposito, he started screaming wildly,
"Someone came, they found me. Get me out of here."
And he kept screaming as Esposito left.
lt was Aída Bortnik who pointed out the error in that.
She told us that after 25 years,
this character would have lost that attitude long ago,
he was a broken character.
She said he should ask for a favor, the most banal favor possible.
Tell him at least to talk to me.
She said this would be much more powerful, and it was.
Please.
You said life.
How do we go from a tragic scene like this one
to the final scene in the movie, which is practically a love scene?
Modulatory bridges were needed here again.
You'll notice them in the music,
the direction and even the dramatic composition.
The cemetery scene, which is coming up,
is a scene where both storylines come together.
There's the death of Sandoval,
which occurred in the detective story,
but Esposito's visit to Sandoval is part of the movie's human storyline.
lt's a scene of transition.
This strong change in the visual code
to a white place colored by flowers.
When we opened the scene with the flowers, it looked like we were in a field of flowers,
but it was just a florist's.
Pay attention to the music here,
the way it changes subtly when he sees the note "l fear."
l FEAR
l LOVE YOU
lt's brilliant.
That change is incredible
and it enables us to perform an impossible balancing act.
-ls she in? -Yeah, in her office.
The movie doesn't say what Esposito does with what he learns at Morales' house.
lt's not necessary at this moment, for this story,
but we can guess what he does later.
We know his character well enough.
We intentionally didn't show it in the movie
so we could spark that debate.
We thought that if the question people asked at the café after the theater was,
"What would Esposito do, knowing that Gomez is in that cell?"
This question would quickly become, "What would l do?"
And that's what we wanted to ask in the movie.
Shut the door.
l hope you enjoyed it.
THE SECRET lN THElR EYES