After Nine Queens, a good but perhaps somewhat overrated thriller involving con games related to some rare stamps, director Fabian Bielinski followed up with The Aura. The film involves an epileptic taxidermist (?), played by Ricardo Darin (a famous Argentine actor, who also starred in Nine Queens) who, by some improbable chances and coincidences, gets involved with a gang in a casino heist in the picturesque Patagonian Andes of Southern Argentina. The plot is not very believable: Bielinski's sources for his films are not real life, but genre films filtered by some heavy and dubious philosophizing. This is not bad in itself; directors like Fuller, Melville and John Woo made some fine films out of pulp material, but Bielinski, who died of a heart attack soon after Aura was released in Argentina, was unfortunately not on their league. His two films show him as a competent genre filmmaker, but neither of those rise up to what can be considered a great film, in my opinion.
