Oscar pushes Argentina's Secret' into the public eye

Thursday, Apr. 29, 2010
Oscar pushes Argentina's Secret' into the public eye
By RENE RODRIGUEZ - McClatchy Newspapers

MIAMI - The world first took notice of "The Secret in Their Eyes" ("El secreto de sus ojos") in March, when the movie upset higher-profile competitors such as "The White Ribbon" and "A Prophet" to walk away with the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film.

The surprise win by the twist-filled, Hitchcock-flavored thriller baffled many Oscar prognosticators, mostly because the film had not yet been widely seen outside the festival circuit and its native Argentina, where it had become a box-office smash.

But Juan Jose Campanella, who wrote and directed the movie, humbly admits he wasn't entirely shocked by the victory.

"People were saying 'This one is the favorite, because it won at Cannes or Berlin,'" Campanella said the day before attending a Miami International Film Festival screening of the movie in March. "But when it comes to the foreign-language Oscars, a much more reliable formula is to look at which movies win the audience award at festivals, not the jury prizes. Out of the five nominees, our movie was the only one that was a true genre film - a film noir - and that's also one of the few American genres. So Academy members were probably able to relate to our movie more. 'A Prophet' was also a genre film - it's a prison movie - but ours also has humor and romance."

Based on the novel by Eduardo Sacheri, "The Secret in Their Eyes" alternates between past and present to tell the story of Benjamin (Ricardo Darin), a recently retired criminal-court investigator still haunted by the unsolved rape and murder of a young woman 25 years earlier. When he starts poking into the cold case once again, the unspoken mutual attraction between Benjamin and his former supervisor Irene (Soledad Villamil), who is now a judge, is reawakened.

More than half of the film unfolds in the mid-1970s during the waning days of Isabel Peron's presidency, when public sentiment started to turn against the democratically elected leader, whose administration increasingly violated human rights for the sake of combating so-called leftist guerrillas.

The political backdrop is an integral element of the film's plot and part of the reason for the great success the movie has enjoyed on its home turf. But Campanella, who was previously an Oscar contender with 2001's "Son of the Bride," is a shrewd filmmaker with years of experience working in mainstream Hollywood (he has directed numerous episodes of such popular TV shows as "Law & Order: Special Victims Unit," "House M.D." and "30 Rock"). He knew that for the movie to travel the world and connect with audiences outside Argentina, the political backdrop had to be easily accessible - if not invisible - to viewers unfamiliar with his country's history.

More:
http://www.thestate.com/2010/04/29/1265242/oscar-pushes-argentinas-secret.html