Some say the “portmanteau” movie is dead. Argentinian film-maker Damián Szifrón proves it isn’t. His Wild Tales are a collection of delicious, horrible, scary and scabrous stories from Argentina, a country which here seems to have reached the end of its tether long ago. These are black-comic nightmares of violence, satirising what he sees as the country’s corruption, cynicism and complacency. Szifrón wrote all of them himself. One can only guess at the mood he was in when he did so —probably a similar mood to that of many of his characters, or perhaps Michael Douglas’s character in the 90s mad-as-hell fable Falling Down.
Barely suppressed rage simmers through all of these short movies. I was reminded of the Argentinian slang word bronca — meaning pissed off. These are visions of a bronca nation.
A fashion model on a plane discovers she has something strange in common with a middle-aged music critic, and the flight ends in calamity. A waitress recognises a nasty customer, and confiding her fears to the elderly cook leads to mayhem. An obnoxious driver’s behaviour triggers a serious bout of road-rage, which culminates in a delirious, blood-stained farce and a ghastly charnel-house image of two skulls in an intimate embrace. Elsewhere, a municipal parking scam enrages a demolition expert (played by the incomparable Ricardo Darin) and he decides to put his skills to good, retaliatory use. A wealthy plutocrat tries to cover up his son’s crime. A bride takes ecstatic revenge on the cheating groom on their wedding day. This last tale is one which, unexpectedly, finds some sort of a happy ending.
Szifrón has taken some influence from Pedro Almodóvar (who in fact co-produces the movie), perhaps something from the Dionysiac wildness of Emir Kusturica and even the tensions of Spielberg’s Duel and Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction. One story is in fact very similar to the plot premise of Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s 2008 movie Three Monkeys.As one divorce lawyer says Ricardo Darin’s character: “I see violence all over the place.” In this movie, violence is indeed everywhere. A recurrent image is smashing glass. Car windshields, glass partitions, mirrored walls in fancy hotels — they all get bashed in. The whole movie shudders and shivers with the repeated impact. Characters surrender, gratefully, to the thrill of losing it and letting someone have it.
The most spectacular act of violence comes at the very beginning, on that strange doomed flight whose passengers find that they are united in what looks like a creepy pattern of coincidences. Szifrón brings off a very difficult trick: making something genuinely funny and genuinely scary at the same time. And the image of the elderly couple blamelessly sunbathing in their garden, and looking up on hearing the drone of an approaching plane is superb. The film lands on its audience with a very similar, pitiless crash. Szifrón himself is no newcomer with a handful of features and TV credits under his belt — but this will surely be his breakthrough. A terrific film and a real find in Cannes.
