White Elephant
Pablo Trapero tackles gang wars and poor urban planning in Buenos Aires.
Pablo Trapero (Argentina, Special Presentation)
Thursday, September 13, 9:45 p.m.
TIFF Bell Lightbox 1 (350 King Street West)
Friday, September 14, 3 p.m.
Scotiabank 2 (259 Richmond Street West)
Sunday, September 16, 5:45 p.m.
Scotiabank 2 (259 Richmond Street West)
With films like Carancho, about an ambulance-chasing lawyer in Buenos Aires, and Lion’s Den, a tough exposé of how women are processed through the capital’s prisons, Pablo Trapero has proven himself foremost as an essayist on major Argentinian institutions gone wrong. White Elephant follows in that tradition with a complex but somewhat dithering look at the competing moral and economic interests surrounding the Villa Maria slums, which house the titular monument—a dilapidated cathedral once intended to be a grand hospital. His focus this time is on the groundwork of Catholic priests and community organizers Julián (Ricardo Darín, from box office heavy and Oscar favourite The Secret in Their Eyes) and Nicolás (Jérémie Renier), who toil to keep the community from falling into the control of gangs.
Renier’s presence as the guilt-ridden French priest who’s just survived a massacre on a mission in the Amazon seems a nod to his status as the frequent muse of the Dardenne brothers. The Belgian filmmakers, internationally renowned for their close tracking shots, their interest in life on the fringes, and their unsparing realism, are a clear inspiration here, and all of those tropes are incorporated more or less effectively. Trapero has the technical skill of a worthy Dardenne disciple and an inherently strong subject in the tension between the priests’ clashing styles—the one favouring a hands-on, street-level sort of intervention, while the other hews closer to Church orthodoxy. What’s missing, though, is a clear sense of what’s at stake in either approach, and who exactly the slum residents, glimpsed only in passing and rarely granted dialogue, are. Without that, this battle for the soul of a hardened Buenos Aires community comes across as overly abstract, and as a result, hard to invest in.
