Beyond the Multiplex

The most original new thriller since "Memento." The year's best relationship movie. Plus: Heath Ledger's a revelation in "Candy."

By Andrew O'Hehir

Read more: Andrew O'Hehir, Movies, Movie Reviews, Arts & Entertainment, Reviews, Beyond the Multiplex

"The Aura"

Nov. 16, 2006 | It's cult-movie week here at Beyond the Multiplex world HQ. What do I mean by that? On some level I don't mean anything: Anybody who's lucky enough to make an independent film and actually get it released hopes it will become a cult movie, hopes it will capture an electrified germ of the Zeitgeist and spread from city to city, from one fevered dinner conversation to another, like an especially virulent strain of the flu.

Still, there are categorical differences. "Little Miss Sunshine" and "An Inconvenient Truth" are this year's big hits (by indie standards). But they're not cult movies. Nobody needed to see them twice, or is likely to keep those DVDs in a place of honor, permanently leaning against the TV, case never quite closed. A cult movie has an audience (be it large or small) that never wants to let go, that finds in that picture a wit or a soul or an existential clarity found nowhere else. A cult movie can be obscure or well known, but it cannot be totally familiar or too widely loved. "Carnival of Souls" and "Reservoir Dogs" and "Solaris" can be cult movies; "Citizen Kane" and "Vertigo" and "The Godfather" cannot.

So this week we've got two engrossing new flicks that just might become cult movies (I have learned not to make predictions about this sort of thing), another that deserves to be but won't and a fourth that already is (at least among film critics, perhaps the tiniest and most self-absorbed cult of all). First up is "The Aura," the dark and dazzling new thriller from Argentine director Fabián Bielinsky, an absolute must for genre fans. Next comes "Candy," a familiar but lovingly constructed saga of junkiehood, built around remarkable performances by Heath Ledger and Abbie Cornish. "Flannel Pajamas," directed by the New York indie-film legend Jeff Lipsky, is an acutely drawn portrait of a yuppie marriage in decay, full of startling detail. And the rerelease of Jean-Luc Godard's 1966 "Two or Three Things I Know About Her" is ... well, it is what it is, and for better or worse it isn't like anything else.

"The Aura": A missing wife, a missing husband, a dog, an epileptic and the perfect crime
Anybody who caught the Mamet-esque crime film "Nine Queens" a couple of years ago could see the tremendous potential of Fabián Bielinsky, who emerged from a long career as an assistant director, screenwriter and teacher in Argentina's film industry with that debut picture. His latest work, "The Aura," might be the most original new thriller I've seen since "Memento." Sadly, Hollywood producers won't get the chance to snatch Bielinsky from the relative obscurity of South America and ruin his impressively cold and dark aesthetic with huge piles of money. He died of a heart attack last summer, at age 47. This is a fine testament, but it's tough that we'll never see what he'd have done next.

"The Aura" isn't a puzzle film in the mode of Christopher Nolan or M. Night Shyamalan, exactly, but it holds its secrets in its own way. This is a tremendously atmospheric movie full of moody mystery, and it'll keep you on the edge of your seat from beginning to end. Played by Ricardo Darín, who was also in "Nine Queens," its protagonist is a ferrety, almost affectless character who doesn't even have a name. In the closing credits he's identified only as "Taxidermist," which is what he is: As the film begins we see him restoring a pair of stuffed foxes, while his unseen wife rails at him through an opaque glass door.

We never meet that wife, and that's only the first in a long list of things Bielinsky withholds from us. The taxidermist comes home one day to find that the wife has cleared out her clothes and left a note. We don't know if he ever reads it, let alone what it says. Later on in the story, two significant characters will come and go -- and I mean go, in the most permanent sense -- without saying a word. And another woman, perhaps also a woman the taxidermist loves, will leave behind another note he will not read.

In addition to stuffing and mounting dead animals, the taxidermist has another talent. He prides himself on his photographic memory, his total recall of details, and he irritates his friend Sontag (Alejandro Awada), wherever they go, by planning the perfect heist, explaining how this bank or museum or accounting office could be painlessly and efficiently cleaned out. Bielinsky shows us these imaginary crimes as the taxidermist outlines them, in a series of exciting, Scorsese-like long takes.

The taxidermist is also an epileptic. As he explains in his only confessional moment in the film, the "aura" that comes just before his seizures is a terrifying but liberating sensation. He can do nothing to stop what is about to happen, but for those few seconds he is free, open to sensation and memory and emotion in a way he never is otherwise. We see several of these attacks, presented as dizzying, sinister, almost supernatural moments. On a pragmatic level, we understand that they're likely to overwhelm the taxidermist at moments of stress. On a metaphorical, symbolic level, they remain mysterious. They just happen, like love or death or an unlikely hunting accident.

You see, after the wife leaves, the taxidermist and Sontag go on a hunting trip together, in the forests of southern Argentina. They're really just acquaintances, not close friends; Sontag had planned to go with another guy, who backed out. It doesn't go well. The hotels are all booked, because a nearby casino is closing for renovation, and they have to stay in a remote, dilapidated cabin complex owned by a local named Dietrich (Manuel Rodal) and his much younger wife, Diana (Dolores Fonzi).

I shouldn't tell you too much beyond that. The two men quarrel and separate. There is a hunting accident, and a strange discovery deep in the woods. The taxidermist forms a tenuous connection with Diana and her surly teenage brother Julio (Nahuel Perez Biscayart), and learns why they hate and fear Dietrich. A pair of menacing gangsters shows up at the cabins. A casino loan shark recognizes the taxidermist, although he's never been to that casino before. A robbery at a factory goes desperately wrong, and the taxidermist finds himself presented (or so he believes) with all the pieces of the perfect heist.

Bielinsky insisted in interviews that "The Aura" isn't really a thriller. To most viewers, me included, it seems like one, but there are certainly things in it that vibrate at a deeper, weirder level. The epileptic-seizure scenes are terrifically powerful but almost irrelevant to the plot (I said almost), and so is Dietrich's dog, a spectral, wolflike creature that seems to recognize a kindred spirit in the taxidermist. In this nihilistic tale of nameless heroes, battered women, missing wives and husbands, self-destructive thugs and pointless violence, there's something else -- maybe a Beckett play or a werewolf movie, or both -- trying to get out.

"The Aura" opens Nov. 17 at the IFC Center in New York, Nov. 30 in Detroit, Dec. 1 in Los Angeles, Dec. 8 in Boston and Dec. 15 in Chicago, with more cities to follow. It is also available pay-per-view on IFC In Theaters, via certain cable TV systems.

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