Juan Josè Campanella
Il segreto dei suoi occhi

Having reached retirement after a not too brilliant career, with years spent in a remote border town, former policeman Benjamin Esposito seeks refuge in writing to put order in his past, attempting to write a novel about the case that marked his life twenty years earlier: the rape and murder of Liliana Coloto, a young woman from Buenos Aires.

Inspiration is lacking, and Esposito is unable to write, until the day he returns to the courthouse where he worked in the '70s at the service of Judge Fortuna and unexpectedly meets his former colleague Irene Hastings, who was then Head Clerk and later became a judge.

Despite some doubts and resistance, stemming from negative memories of the time, the woman begins to read the manuscript and invites Esposito to continue with the difficult drafting of the novel, which mixes true crime, historical events of an Argentina in economic crisis and on the verge of a military dictatorship, and daily life stories at the Buenos Aires courthouse, among the tantrums of Judge Fortuna, the pettiness of the reactionary colleague Romano, and the light and ingenious touch of his friend and colleague Pablo Sandoval.

The narrative is based on the counterpoint between a static present, in which a grayed-out Benjamin and a weary Irene try to put in order buried events that somehow influenced their lives and careers, and a tormented past, where the young policeman and his colleague Sandoval embarked on an unauthorized investigation, with moments both comedic and frantic, in search of Liliana's assassin, out of a duty to truth and justice and to fulfill a promise made to the murdered woman's widower, Ricardo Morales.

In the search for the assassin, conducted through photographs of the victim, the two policemen gradually get closer to the identity of a criminal who seems elusive and who is eventually arrested thanks to Sandoval's intuition, for whom, in life, everything can change and everything can be surrendered, except for one's own passion, whether it's a hidden and undeclared love, alcohol and brawls in a suburban bar, or soccer. Around it revolves each of our lives, and through it, one can discover anyone's secret.

The identification of the culprit - who then confesses thanks to Hastings - is, however, only the beginning of the drama, which intersects with the advent of the military dictatorship and the transformation of the police into guardians of the regime, through the violence of its political section and the torturers who are part of it.

And it is here, in the mid-'70s, that the different paths of Esposito, Hastings, Sandoval, and Morales begin, where Liliana's murder is nothing more than the triggering cause of their respective solitudes and individual tragedies, which only the writing of a belated novel will manage to placate.

"The Secret in Their Eyes" - 2010 Oscar for Best Foreign Film - is a false detective story that, despite its premises and the plot's own development, uses the mysteries and contradictions of the crime to talk about the lives and feelings of those who survived the victim, who, in attempting to punish the culprit and restore the order violated by the murder, have gradually lost control of their own lives, whether due to obsession - like the woman's widower - or by chance - like the two policemen - or by necessity - like the young Head Clerk - all enduring their own fate with resigned fatalism.

Deeply rooted in South American culture and literature, the film, itself adapted from a novel by Eduardo Sacheri, echoes the narrative style of Borges, Cortázar, Vargas Llosa, and Bolaño, where it puts at the center of the narrative lawmen or orderkeepers who are agitated in search of a truth, justice, and a love perceived by the protagonists as an absolute good for which everything can be risked, up to exile and the sacrifice of life itself, but which precisely for their ideal tension prove to be "distant stars," remote and incomprehensible to a world dominated by violence, corruption, and compromise, and where, as a character in the film disdainfully says, "an Esposito always remains an Esposito: a nobody."

Therefore, the entire film plays on the tension of opposites, whether they be present and past, absolute love and resignation in daily peace, suffering and resignation, surrender to vice and talented zeal, intelligence and violence, city and periphery, sacrifice and selfishness, continually overturning the perspective offered to the viewer until they get lost in a labyrinth in which one resigns to walking narrow paths surrounded by walls rather than grasping a fulfilling and complete vision of life and its values.

It would thus seem to be a pessimistic, tragic, and inescapable film by Campanella, participating in the nihilism that serves as a counterpoint to any unfulfilled pursuit of value, confronted with the limits, illusions, and disillusionments that follow.

Yet, there remains the secret of "his" eyes, where the possessive pronoun is deliberately left in indeterminacy, so that upon leaving the cinema, one wonders to whom the eyes belong, what secret they hide, and what the ultimate meaning of this secret is.

They could be the eyes of the victim, closed by a pitying hand with a cellophane glove, or still open in the prominently displayed photograph on a country bookshelf; or the eyes of someone to whom one never declared their love, awakening the feeling as soon as they're crossed, even behind a pair of presbyopic lenses; those of a friend who has the prudence to help us when we are in trouble, drunk in a bar, or exposed to the revenge of dangerous men; those of a widower desperately waiting for a train that will never come or of a prisoner in solitary hope of a word that makes his punishment less painful.

Every eye has its secret, and every secret conceals a passion that, once discovered, can give a meaning, tragic or comic, to everyone's life, however "complicated" it may be, to use the adjective with which Irene Hastings, smiling, defines the state of things at the conclusion of the story.

A meaning that can only be intuited or stumbled upon suddenly, but that never changes, as each of ours never changes, if you think about it.