The Secret In Their Eyes

The Secret In Their Eyes won Best Foreign Language Film at the American Academy Awards 2010 and hopefully it doesn’t mean that a Hollywood remake is planned, for it would be blasphemy to Americanize this Argentinean masterpiece.

The film is as much crime thriller as it is love story, or simply a story that deals with the human condition by using a crime as the catalyst. Benjamin Esposito (Ricardo Darin) is a sixty-something criminal court employee who has recently retired. Single, and with more time on his hands then he would like to have, he decides to write a novel to fill his lonely hours. What he is in the process of writing, however, is not something derived from his fantasy and imagination, but from his past.

In 1974, his court was assigned an investigation into the rape and murder of a beautiful young woman called Liliana - married to Ricardo Morales (Pablo Rago), an ordinary guy with an ordinary job at a bank who worshipped her. Together with Pablo Sandoval (Guillermo Francella), his best friend at the justice department, Benjamin tries to put the pieces together as to why violence and death brought the happiness of this newlywed couple to an abrupt end. It is not an easy task, thanks to the apathy and ineptitude of a police and legal system that is furthermore rife with corruption and an Argentina that, in 1974, proves to be a backdrop for hate, violence, revenge and death. But Benjamin can also turn to Irene Menéndes Hastings (Soledad Villamil) who, at the beginning of the story, lands a job as a secretary in court thanks to her father’s connections. Later on, she becomes his superior and the woman he falls deeply in love with, although there is no sign that she will ever return his feelings.

Forward to the present and Benjamin is still in love with Irene, who now runs her own court and is married with kids. While Benjamin continues to write the novel and lift the heavy seal of silence, he constantly needs to revisit the ghosts of the past in order to carry on with his future. Love, crime, conviction and punishment all come to live in a tense story that keeps moving between past and present and asks how decisions that were made many years ago can still affect the lives of the characters today.