The Aura (2006; Spanish from Argentina) is an interesting and original movie, but whether it is likable is another matter. Much of the careful craft is designed to distance you from the action, quite the opposite of the typical heist movie.
Almost every shot is so carefully thought out that the cinematography is simultaneously beautiful and distancing. Take for example the opening scene. We see a man lying on a white tile floor, and as the camera stops, his head is perfectly framed between two black lines of tile grout. The next edit is precisely as his hand moves. When he stands, his head and trunk go out of camera range, but his legs remain, perfectly balanced with the vertical door jambs behind him in the bank lobby. When he exits, the sight lines and the camera lens make it seems that he is leaving us through the only logical opening in the scene but a little too fast. If you’re getting the picture, you’ll not be surprised to learn that we have no idea who this guy is or what he is doing. Intriguing or annoyingly obscurantist?
The film could have been shot with dynamic, vivid colour, which would have highlighted the beautiful Patagonian forest and put a lot of the action in your face. But it wasn’t. Because the film is sort of neo-noir, it could have been shot with the dramatic and stark shadows of classic noir. But it wasn’t. Instead director Fabian Bielinsky chose a soft, faintly blurry, almost gritty look. The look is at odds with the anger, desperation, confusion, and dead bodies. Is this a stylistic feature that enhances the film’s theme, or a quirk that distances viewers, or both?
The sound simultaneously engages and distances. Quite often classical music replaces any natural sound, as for example when a vehicle bounces down a rough road and all we hear is lovely and cerebral piano. Robbing us of the sounds we are used to distances us, but it also lets Bielinsky bring us back with a jolt as when the sound is all muffled until a gun shot is heard “naturally.”
Where Bielinsky really flirts with disaster is when he keeps us, for the full 2 hours and 18 minutes, distanced from the main character. The 45-year old guy looks scruffy and depressed. The is so taciturn that one character remarks, “Imagine that—you starting a conversation!” He is also stoic, his face giving little sign that he is about to have an epileptic fit or that he is about to be executed with a shot in the back of the head. Is this a subtle and clever character study, or are we supposed to hang on the every move of a guy we don’t know and couldn’t care less about?
Once the protagonist, who has always fantasized plans for robbing banks, stumbles upon a heist and gets involved, the suspense builds. The suspense is not an artificially induced anxiety created by jump cuts and frantic music but rather the natural, human inclination to figure out what in the blazes is going to happen next. To the movie’s credit, what happens next is neither entirely predictable nor entirely surprising.
posted on Wednesday, February 13, 2008 3:24 AM by JimBell