Dirty Wars

  A pair from Argentina, then and now and then:

AZOR (B+) - It's everything that's left unsaid that makes this period piece inscrutable but mysterious and satisfying. Swiss private banker Yvan de Wiel (Fabrizio Rangione) travels to Buenos Aires in late 1980, at the height of the repressive military regime, to clean up after his business partner, Rene Keys, who, like many dissidents at the time, has gone missing. Yvan has his elegant wife, Ines (Stephanie Cleau), with him as part of his sophisticated presentation as he navigates a country-club world of rogue strongmen looking to move their dirty money around. 

The pace of this 100-minute drama is gorgeously slow; it unfolds like a casual vacation outfit. Yvan seems to be in over his head, with his old-fashioned sophistication and slight features, which are no match for the macho men of Argentina. Rangione has a hang-dog look, like a chagrined poker player, and his wife, a statuesque femme fatale who can disable a man with an exhale of cigarette smoke, prods him with a few strategically placed passive-aggressive putdowns meant to rally his manhood. Cleau and Rangione are a post-Peron Nick and Nora.

It helps to not try to understand all of the politics of the day or to follow every single character or name that gets dropped throughout the story. First-time director Andreas Fontana (writing with a veteran, Mariano Llinas) apparently intends to keep us a bit confused and off-kilter, perhaps to heighten the tension and mirror Yvan's own flailing through a treacherous world of shady figures. Yvan tries to solve the mystery of "Lazaro," a possible clue to Keys' whereabouts. 

Meantime, he shmoozes and spars with an interesting cast of characters: a sophisticated older woman with roots in Europe (played by the poet Carmen Iriondo); a melancholy horseman whose politically active daughter has been disappeared; a bully who can barely give him the time of day; and most menacing of all, a monsignor (a smoldering Pablo Torre Nilson) who makes mob bosses look like Arby's managers. Eventually Yvan will take a Kurtzian excursion into a veritable heart of darkness, which will test his Swiss manners and willingness to play the treacherous global game of Follow the Money.

CARANCHO (2011) (B+) - This brutal, pulpy love story is an unrelenting examination of the shady practice of ambulance-chasing and insurance fraud. It's a bloody, bruising game that has ensnared Sosa (Ricardo Darin) after he loses his law license, and the goal here is to go straight, if he can escape the gravitational pull of the mafia-like operation. 

On one of his gambits, Sosa meets Lujan (Martina Gusman), a cute doctor who rides the ambulance as an on-call responder, and he is smitten. With her own issues (she shoots up drugs to get through her double shifts), she will make Sosa work to win her over, especially after she finds out the racket he is wrapped up in. Sosa gets beat up a lot, and between those drubbings and the staged accidents (sometimes with codeine injections beforehand to steel the "victim") there is a lot of blood, broken bones and stitches.

Director Pablo Trapero shoots this in cinema verite documentary style, bathing the visuals in grit and grime. Darin is an appealing actor who has been invaluable in movies like "Nine Queens," "The Secret in Their Eyes," as well as more recent turns in "Wild Tales" and "Everybody Knows." He carries this movie like an old-school noir PI, and he pairs well with Gusman as the recalcitrant, beleaguered medical professional trying to keep it all together.

Three longtime collaborators helped Trapero hone the screenplay, which is spare and affecting. They could have pared about 15 of the 107 minutes (I could have used fewer shots of Lujan jabbing a needle into the top of her bruised foot). As it becomes clear that Sosa will be incredibly lucky to escape the vortex he is in, the screenwriters build this to a shocking crescendo. They have a clever echo double ending up their sleeve, and it's perfectly rendered.

BONUS TRACK

From a tender scene in "Carancho," Javier Solis with "Nuestro Juramento":