User Reviews

The Aura (El Aura) is Bielinsky's second feature. Two will be all we'll have from him, because he died this year of a heart attack at forty-six. The first is Nine Queens, which is rather famous and suffered an American remake. Nine Queens is an exceptionally inventive teaser and puzzler about con games. The Aura is a teaser and puzzler too, but a moodier noir, focused on a 'existential" loser hero (like Meursault in Camus' Stranger), with a slower pace and a more beautiful look. It meanders and winds up more or less where it started – plus a shaggy dog. Maybe it goes on too long, but Bielinsky has used the noir format – a heist, actually several, that go wrong; a naive man who falls in with dangerous company – to develop a rich and mysterious character who's got all the ambitions and defects of the noir hero, and then some. No one respects him and his larcenous ambitions are absurd, but when things get going he holds his own against some pretty rough characters. He goes through many emotions, while remaining fascinatingly unreadable and strange.

This unnamed hero (the exceptional Ricardo Darin, who also starred in Nine Queens), a taxidermist in Buenos Aires with epilepsy, first appears on the floor in front of an ATM machine after a seizure. He gets up and pushes the button and the cash comes out—his life is like that. Next, he's in his workshop assembling a fox. While he's delivering it to a museum he meets Sontag (Alejandro Awada), a condescending friend (strangers look down on him too) to whom he explains how easy it would be to rob the guards bringing the employees' pay. To show how much the taxidermist believes his own fantasy, we see the imaginary robbery rapidly enacted around them. Sontag has heard all this before, and seen his friend show off his photographic memory, and has little use for any of this. But since his first choice for the weekend was unavailable, he invites the taxidermist to come hunting. He refuses. But then, going home and finding his wife has left him, he changes his mind.

Out in the woods of Patagonia he accidentally kills a man called Dietrich (Manuel Rodal) who owns a seedy hunting lodge, and after Sontag leaves in a huff knowing nothing about this, the taxidermist falls heir to his victim's plans for robbing a casino. A pair of vicious hoods (Pablo Ceyrón, Walter Reyno) turn up, hired long distance to take part in the heist but not yet knowing all the details of it. The taxidermist improvises, as he's always done, about a robbery, based on what he's seen in the dead man's shack, foolishly pretending that he's been in on the plan all along. He also gets involved with Dietrich's young wife Diana (Dolores Fonzi) and her surly teenage brother Julio (Nahuel Pérez Biscayart). Finding neckties, chips, and notebooks with betting schemes, he goes to the casino and is immediately spotted by a security man-cum-loan shark (Jorge D'Elia) who picks his pocket and turns out to be the man who planned the caper with Dietrich. The taxidermist's larcenous ambitious are absurd, in his hands the plans for the heist get ever more complicated and confused, but he nonetheless bluffs his way through. There's another heist too that he gets to peek at as a result of listening to messages on Dietrich's cell phone. They all go wrong, Reservoir Dogs style.

"The Aura" is the word doctors give the moment before an epileptic attack, he tells Diana, a magic moment when he feels safe and free, but is helpless to resist the seizure. Apart from the striking widescreen photography of cinematographer Checco Varese, we can almost see the sound track, created by Jose Luis Diaz Ouzande and Carlos Abbate, which creates the epileptic attacks as aural environments, and brings in sputterings of guns and twitterings of birds; this is further enhanced by the music, never obtrusive, of Lucio Godoy.

The beauty of Bielensky's pacing is that the rush of action is interrupted by peaceful pauses, and the story, which is far more complex than we can suggest here, is sequenced in days to give it structure. Writers have alluded to a zombie movie or a Beckett story as hiding somewhere here. The torturous suspense of Coens' Blood Simple comes to mind, and also many previous noirs, but The Aura, with its Patagonian atmosphere and striking images and sound and its careful pacing, is distinctive. Darin's character is central to the film. Never was a noir more about character and never was that character so unique. Yet the taxidermist, like Dietrich's wolf-like dog with burning eyes who adopts him, remains a cinematic enigma. Bielinsky was an original and a meticulous craftsman who gives you lots to chew on. With this second feature, Bielinsky's demise seems tragic. The world has lost someone who was already becoming a master.

I am trying to understand the contribution of sound to cinematic narrative. It seems multidimensional compared to the linearity of the delivered narrative and three dimensional nature of the cinematic vocabulary. Though the detail we need to sustain narrative is missing, music (and sound generally) can form the skeleton of a rich narrative. It will take me some time to wade through this with the Zimmers and Elfmans distracting.

Meanwhile, here is a film that understands the power of silence.

The story revolves around man who takes dead things and makes them look as if they were alive and making noise. He himself has seizure disorder and often crosses that boundary between silence-blindness and speaking-seeing. In between, right on the edge of that transition, is "the aura," a strange supernatural state where dreams diffuse. Some people experience it as colors or sound; range pretty much covers everything. This man experiences it as a narrative, which form the "film within."

Spanish-speaking filmmakers have a long tradition of interweaving realism with other layers, sometimes unfortunately called magical. The evolution of this explores all sorts of folds, and I believe that the possibilities are roughly the same explored by those trying to mix on-screen singing into a realistic narrative. It is not a reach to see the taxidermy and abandoned wife segments as more "real," and the heist segments as "in aura," with a transitional segment early in the movie where the heist is imagined from the alert state. Describing it this way does not do justice to the construction.

The inner bits are noir-driven, meaning that there is an inevitability, a conspiracy of the cosmos. It has gambling, accidental engagements, partial but not adequate glimpses of what is going on. This filmmaker's last film worked this sort of thing with the imposition of the con game on "reality." Here he is much more masterful, seamless enough that he is able to give us both noir and an outer awareness, that recognition of the aura.

If you think of it, the power that noir has over us is the way we see ourselves as helplessly buffeted by forces. But the form has become so formulaic that it loses its effectiveness, its art. This solution, what this filmmaker has done here is brilliant. Unfortunately forces beyond his control took him away from us into his own world now.

The effectiveness of the noir dynamic here is accentuated by what he takes away. He takes the sound away. There are long pauses here. Time stands still for the viewer while the world moves. It is more effective than any score could be.

Ted's Evaluation -- 3 of 3: Worth watching.

The Argentinian writer-director Fabián Bielinsky gained international fame and recognition for his twist-filled feature length debut feature "Nine Queens" in 2000. Sadly, he only completed one more film before dying unexpectedly in 2006. "The Aura" is a much more obscure film that did not receive anything like its predecessor's worldwide distribution and attention, and when you see it you kind of understand why - it's a less accessible, less enjoyable film. That does not mean it's not worth seeing, though. First of all, you should know that - despite what the title or the poster might suggest - there are no supernatural elements here; it is, essentially, a heist movie like "Nine Queens", albeit a more serious one. Bielinsky directs with a sometimes mesmerizing virtuosity, but his script could have been tighter; the film is overlong at 2 hours plus. Darin's mostly impassive performance also requires some audience adjustment. But the final 15 minutes are quite suspenseful, and overall it is clear that Bielinsky was a gifted artist. **1/2 out of 4.

I can't deny I had great expectations regarding this movie after seeing Bielinsky masterpiece "Nueve Reinas", so I might be a little biased.

First, Ricardo Darín performance is totally disappointing. Even when Esteban Espinosa is a phlegmatic and introverted taxidermist, one could expect a hint of consternation after he accidentally kills a man; instead, he acts as if he had lost his car's keys. And the rest of the cast (save Dolores Fonzi) is even worse.

Second, the dialogs are absolutely weak. Maybe that contributed to the poor performances, pushing the actors to think "How can I say this unrealistic and extemporaneous line without looking stupid?".

On the bright side: Even when the pace is too slow (my wife was bored to death during the whole movie), it kept my attention almost all the time, mostly due to a clever plot. It's clearly the kind of pace that sets you in the right mood for this movie. I was a bit disappointed by the ending, but it's not like it wasted a masterpiece, anyway.

Maybe if I dared to watch it a second time with less expectations, now that I know it's not remotely close to "Nueve Reinas", I could find it to be good. In fact, if I hadn't watched "Nueve Reinas" I could end up thinking it's the best Argentinian movie ever, which says more about Argentinian cinema than this film in particular.

If u like dark thrillers,and u like edgar allan poe tales...this is the best way to see this movie. Is maybe the darkest argentinian movie ever made. In this movie u see that ricardo darin should play more thrillers and action movies than just good guys.