‘Carancho’ movie review: Crashing the Oscars

Makes surviving the mall parking lots a grateful experience

BY MIRIAM RINN

NEWJERSEYNEWSROOM.COM

If you're not depressed enough by the anemic economy, the endless snowfalls, the mean and petty quality of our politics, and the hopelessness of getting a decent parking spot at the Garden State Plaza, you could always go see "Carancho," Argentina's selection for the Oscars this year. It will make you grateful that you're able to drive around and around the mall parking lot without someone deliberately smashing into you or flinging himself under the wheels of your car.

Starring Ricardo Darin, who played the lead in last year's Argentinean Oscar-winner "The Secret in Their Eyes," this far less successful effort focuses on the incredible rate of fatal auto accidents that take place in Argentina — an average of 22 a day. Many of these accidents, the film implies, are the result of, or at the very least, result in insurance fraud. Darin plays Sosa, a lawyer who has lost his license and makes a living ambulance chasing for a shady foundation. To do this kind of work, you need to be friends with the ambulance driver, and perhaps with the doctor on the ambulance as well. Lujan (Martina Gusman) is the young physician who rides the ambulance that Sosa chases most nights. Meeting several times in the course of their work, they soon become lovers.

An ER resident at a rundown hospital that seems to care mostly for the poor, Lujan has her own problems. Overworked and exhausted, she's a heroin addict — a common affliction for medical personnel who have easy access to drugs. Whether it's her habit or the brutal hours she works that are to blame, Lujan makes mistakes, sometimes endangering her patients, and her supervisors are on her case. Both Sosa and Lujan are desperate characters, barely holding on, hoping for some kind of break.

Much of the film takes place at night, and it seems to be always raining. Shooting in the seedy La Matanza district of Buenos Aries, director Pablo Trapero often keeps his camera out of focus and his colors muddy and dim. All is dark, dank, and corrupted. The overuse of extreme close-ups in cars and other tight spaces makes the film seem even more claustrophobic and confusing. It's difficult to tell where we are much of the time.

Darin is a big star in Argentina, and it's easy to understand why. His weathered face has a beaten-down sympathetic quality, which makes it almost credible that this much younger woman would be interested. Gusman effectively conveys Lujan's attempt to avoid the hardened cynicism that would make it easier to do her job. She care about her patients, but she's just so tired. They make a likable couple — if only it wasn't so clear that they are doomed. But there aren't really any surprises here; it's one disaster after another until the end, which is one too many.

Carancho means vulture, and evidently lawyers who urge accident victims to sue for disabilities and then pocket a large part of the reward are called "caranchos" in Argentina. Most of the victims are poor, naturally, and perhaps that much more needful of money, however it arrives. Poor, often illiterate, and gullible, they are easy pickings for the vultures that swoop down on them.