this was a story that would not be illuminated by such details.
In the backdrop of this conversation, a blank-faced pianist softly plinks out “Feelings,” that ubiquitous mid-’70s anthem of ersatz emotion.įontana is careful, though, not to let the soft-rock ballad overwhelm the scene-not to let, as Didion explains after taking careful notes during a trip to a San Salvador shopping mall, the syrupy tune stand as a “kind of inductive irony, the detail that was supposed to illuminate the story.” She continues: “I realized that. “The cream of the junta meets there,” this associate tells the banker-words meant not as a rebuke but praise. Like Didion, Fontana explores the tension created between an offhand, banal detail and a more sinister action in the foreground, as when Yvan, meeting a colleague at a hotel bar, tells him, with no small amount of pride, of an upcoming meeting at an exclusive club. But the book that Fontana’s expertly calibrated film, which he cowrote with Mariano Llinás, often conjured for me was Salvador, Joan Didion’s 1983 volume of reportage on the early years of El Salvador’s civil war, a chronicle that coolly yet unsparingly analyzes the outsize role played by US foreign policy in the Central American nation’s carnage (policy that also, of course, made possible the right-wing dictatorships in Argentina, Chile, and other South American countries in the ’70s and ’80s). Some critics have invoked John le Carré or Graham Greene when describing Azor’s slow-release malefic mood. For this couple, the inviolable boundary between outer and inner life has long been eroded.įabrizio Rongione as Yvan in Azor. (Rarely without a cigarette, Inés never passes up an opportunity for a languorous swim water-averse Yvan’s lone concession to leisurewear is to unbutton the top of his white dress shirt.) Playing patrician characters whose life work consists of charming, coaxing, and flattering the likewise wealthy, no matter how vulgar or repugnant, Rongione and Cléau adroitly assume the opacity that is the inexorable result of this kind of relentless performance, donning facades not just while trying to woo the rich but also during private moments. The financier’s soigné spouse has a gift for extracting useful intel during insipid conversations-about Gstaad, say-with the privileged matrons of Buenos Aires, desultory chats held in vast living rooms or in Hockney-perfect pools.
To aid him in his mission of soothing the skittish plutocrats, Yvan’s wife, Inés (Stéphanie Cléau), accompanies him. Stéphanie Cléau as Inés and Fabrizio Rongione as Yvan in Azor. Set in Buenos Aires during late 1980, at roughly the midpoint of Argentina’s Dirty War-the reign of terrorism perpetuated by the country’s military dictatorship from 1976 to 1983- Azor follows Yvan (Fabrizio Rongione), a Swiss private international banker who’s come to the capital city on a dual mission: to find out what happened to Keys, his business partner, who was last heard from about a month ago, and to reassure their affluent Argentine clientele, unnerved by Keys’s vanishing. The aural dread matches the unease provoked by this anonymous figure’s unsettling mirth, with its hints of barely concealed mania or derangement.Ī few scenes into Azor, the superb debut feature of Andreas Fontana, viewers will surmise that this fleetingly glimpsed character is a man named Keys, who operates as the film’s structuring absence. He laughs at something, though he’s muted, the audio dominated by the skittish sounds of an electro-harpsichord. Before this one-dimensional, lush greenery stands a shaggy-haired, besuited man who is himself a kind of optical illusion, for he’ll never be seen again. A shot of prodigious verdure, which seems to place us in a jungle, turns out to be only photo wallpaper adorning a conference room. Azor, directed by Andreas Fontana, now playing in New York City opening Septemin Los AngelesĪzor, a slinky political thriller about deception, dissembling, and self-delusion, appositely begins with a bit of trompe l’oeil.
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