Commentary – The Secret In Their Eyes

I highly recommend seeing Juan Jose Campanella’s
The Secret In Their Eyes, (winner of this year’s Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film – Argentina). If you read the reviews or even the synopsis, it makes the film sound too complicated and slow. True, it is a hearty soup of genre’s – Film Noir, Murder Mystery, Drama, Love Story, Crime Novel, but the ingredients compliment each other, never one overpowering the other. (pictured Ricardo Darín & Soledad Villamil)

The subtitles are written as if nothing is lost in translation, particularly the surprising humor. The story within a story, storytelling has been done a million times before, but in this case it’s done with such subtleties and seamless transitions between the past and the present. I won’t give the details away, but I was so taken by the fact that the missing “A” has the power to turn “Fear” into “Love”.

Campanella wrote the following piece for Landmark Theaters.com: Secrets about a story like this one perhaps: a story about a murder, true, but above all a story about love. A story about love in its purest form. A love that ended when it was only in the bud, with no time even to fade and die. How could a love like that be lived? What effect would it have on the people involved? What acts of madness could a pair of eyes commit when love is taken away from them?... Click HERE for the full article