Azor

If com­plex fis­cal mech­a­nisms in the pri­vate bank­ing sec­tor is some­thing that gets you hot, then you’re absolute­ly not going to want to miss this debut fea­ture by Argen­tin­ian film­mak­er Andreas Fontana. We join Fab­rizio Rongione’s Yvan De Wiel and his wife Inés (Stéphanie Cléau) as they hop from Gene­va – where he works as a pri­vate banker – to Buenos Aires and then saunter polite­ly among the social elites, clink­ing glass­es as they search for his miss­ing part­ner, an elu­sive fel­low named René Keys.

The film takes place dur­ing the country’s mil­i­tary jun­ta of the mid-’70s and through to the ​’80s, and as affa­ble as Yvan appears to be, the polit­i­cal con­text is of no inter­est to him what­so­ev­er. The only time in the film he appears ruf­fled is at a race track where he has to queue to show his pass­port to secu­ri­ty forces. Fontana doesn’t lean too heav­i­ly on how this scion of cap­i­tal­ism is entire­ly unwor­ried by the killings and oppres­sion that occurs in the back­ground, which in turn makes it extreme­ly dif­fi­cult to lay a firm val­ue judge­ment on our hero as he bur­rows down the rab­bit hole in search of Keys.

Azor could be coined a thriller in the loos­est sense of the term, and its sto­ry ensnares you very slow­ly but very sure­ly. The episod­ic plot doesn’t so much drip-feed morsels of infor­ma­tion, more than it takes a com­plex sit­u­a­tion and con­stant­ly moves the bound­aries of where Yvan should be look­ing and what Keys moti­va­tions may have been. The more peo­ple talk, the more it becomes clear that Keys was a social chameleon, beloved by some, loathed by oth­ers and oper­at­ing in an illog­i­cal man­ner that seems anath­e­ma to the cool-head­ed work of the pri­vate banker.

The film avoids heat­ed con­fronta­tion almost entire­ly, yet men­ace seeps from the screen through sug­ges­tion and micro-inflec­tion. A lengthy and very genial con­ver­sa­tion with an age­ing mon­sign­or about the dan­ger and unpre­dictabil­i­ty of play­ing the cur­ren­cy mar­kets is laced with an air of malev­o­lence, pure­ly because Yvan’s spar­ring part­ner looks like a mafia capo who could kill him at any moment. Inés, mean­while, has hap­py to be ush­ered off into anoth­er room, or else­where, while the men do their busi­ness, which is a shame as there are unful­filled inti­ma­tions that she has some kind of con­trol over the cau­tious Yvan.

In its clois­tered world of priv­i­leged men talk­ing in room, hatch­ing plans to par­lay their for­tunes into pow­er, it recalls a stripped-back John le Car­ré-like spy yarn, par­tic­u­lar­ly the gen­er­al sense of world-weari­ness and apa­thy among the play­ers. It’s per­haps one or two incre­ments too obscure, too puz­zling and too unwill­ing to give any­thing away that it seems to end mid-sen­tence, with­out any tra­di­tion­al clo­sure. Yet it’s still a bold work that puts great faith in its cast to play along with this game of chill­ing insou­ciance. It’s one of few films which gen­uine­ly deserves to be described as ​“Lynchi­an”.