Azor

Azor
Azor

Azor

“Azor,” which is set in Argentina during 1980, is a slow, quiet film. It’s not flashy, and that’s why it’s so terrifying. You feel like you get it after the movie ends: this is how authoritarian power grabs happen. It doesn’t leave you thinking “oh, the humanity”. Instead, you’re left with “what would I do if I were there? Would I be the revolutionary hero of my fantasies or what?”

This is a first feature by writer-director Andreas Fontana who takes his time bringing us into and around where we are. The film unfolds at about the midpoint in a military purge of civilian government that occurred between 1976-1983 and killed thousands people while also torturing or disappearing many more not to mention stealing their land and property from their families.

Yvan de Wiel (Fabrizio Rongione) is a Swiss private banker who has come to Argentina with his wife Ines (Stéphanie Cléau) looking for his partner Keys; this man is alluringly absent but present, much like Harry Lime in “The Third Man” or Kurtz in any number of versions of “Heart of Darkness” (which Fontana nods at by having his protagonist travel upriver through some jungle). He’s brilliant and distracted and depraved; he can’t be trusted but he’s very charming indeed or so they say. All we know for certain is that when he went away on business one day something else happened instead & now Yvan needs to finish what was started there before things really go south.

We feel a persistent worry from the opening scenes of “Azor.” Yvan and Ines, fresh off an airplane, are driven to their city hotel by a driver who is stopped at a police checkpoint. Two young men are being held at gunpoint on the street. We don’t hear the voices of these men or the officers detaining them, but we fear they’ll soon be up against a wall and shot.

When the couple arrives at the hotel, Yvan’s otherwise perfunctory conversation with the desk manager takes an ominous turn after he describes what they saw coming over. Though it’s probably against his professional code to express political opinions on the job, he makes an exception because he’s offended by the implication that something is rotten in Argentina. “You don’t understand,” he says. “The situation was awful here. The country needs major reforms.”

The ellipses and irritations endured by this couple are how this movie helps us feel not just understand on an intellectual level what happens when a military junta takes over a country. Appointments aren’t kept. You can’t find out why they weren’t kept, or where that person is now.

There are face to face and phone conversations about buying and selling things, but we’re not sure how those items were obtained or if they truly belong to these sellers in this place. We hear secondhand about an important man who was visited by police, who “took everything” from his house. One client has a driver in his employ whom we’re told is not good at driving but is kept around because he’s willing to do “other favors” for the boss.

Dekerman (Juan Pablo Gereto) is a lawyer representing one major client, Aníbal Farrell (Ignacio Vila), who threatens to withdraw his assets from Azor Bank & Trust Ltd., Switzerland). Like all other major characters in this film in Belgian-born, Switzerland-based director Andreas Fontana’s first fiction feature Deckerman speaks in the same genteel language. Until, that is, he gets Yvan alone at the track and tells him that his boss was connected to Keys (they’re code names) “like an addict sucking his dealer’s dick.” The language here is shocking because nobody else has talked this way up until now. The balance of this scene proceeds without further comment on that line, but we see how it destabilizes Yvan.

Rongione is great throughout, never more so than when he shows us how Yvan’s “professionalism” amounts to a suppression of a moral read on events. His wife begins to seem like a further-along version of whatever Yvan is (Arielle Cleau matches Rongione by out-underplaying him which could not have been easy to do, since Rongione plays the character with such extreme understatement: affable, pleasant-seeming average guy who just wants to do his job well).

Inés looks terrific in her array of designer dresses and swimsuits (beautifully suited for swimming in fancy pools attached to luxury hotels), also while sipping cocktails in said lobbies and smoking cigarettes and making chit-chat; she seems to live for these moments when she can immerse herself most fully in the privileges that Yvan’s business world has afforded them both also when gently steering him back onto established processes whenever he evinces regret over bad things he may be enabling.

There’s a touch of Graham Greene (“The Quiet American”) to this film’s portrayal of corruption as it manifests among a nation’s upper classes. All people with money wonder how they can escape being disappeared/executed/persecuted as variously imagined fates befall those below them.

Their motives include self-centeredness, greed and unwillingness to support any principle that exposes them to risk or even slight inconvenience. Some are disgusted with themselves for being such small sad creatures while others are just more matter-of-fact about the importance of embracing change. A priest who puts his money in Yvan’s bank calls what is happening in Argentina “a purification phase,” as though there were something in the water that needs to be filtered out.

There’s a family in this movie, led by one of the hero’s clients, that has had an adult daughter missing for many years a political agitator who protested against the junta. The film shows us how they express their grief and terror by not talking about it. She simply isn’t there anymore.

I’m not sure what I expected from “Azor,” but I didn’t expect this, and that should count as high praise. Like paranoid films from the ’70s about powerful people exerting their will through intimidation (I kept thinking of “The Conversation” because of all the words and phrases that remain eerily unexplained), it takes place in a world that is chaotic and violent but pretends everything is normal.

In its measured, rigorously classical way, it gets at a dark truth about what happens to citizens when one side has spent decades disempowering, intimidating, obstructing and stripping resources from the other side of politics which can’t be bothered to mount an effective resistance because they’re too busy trying to keep what they’ve still got and hoping whatever bad things happened to the ruler’s targets don’t happen to them.

“Azor” was inspired by a letter found among his father’s papers by writer-director Andreas Fontana; his dad was also a Swiss private banker like Yvan. It recounted a business trip taken during this same Argentine period without making any mention of what was going wrong there at the time; it was just a letter home about another day at work, other dollars made. That’s how tyrannies take over: inch by inch, with the unspoken consent of the soulless and self-protective, facilitated by professionals who earn commissions from them.

Watch Azor For Free On Gomovies.

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