Features > Movie Reviews > Carancho…

People like Frank Galvin, the alcoholic defense attorney played by Paul Newman in The Verdict. But if Argentina’s Carancho is anything to go by, the situation is even worse in South America.

Sosa (Ricardo Darin) doesn’t just chase ambulances, he pays off emergency service workers, crashes funerals and even choreographs accidents, all in the pursuit of insurance claims.  In Buenos Aires they call him a “vulture” (which is what “carancho” means). But as one of the ambulance staff points out, if you’re lying under a bus with broken bones and no insurance, a vulture who will help you screw the insurance company is about the best you can hope for.

We first see him on the receiving end of a well-deserved beating after a bereaved family have twigged he didn’t know the deceased from Adam. Minutes later he’s helping get an accident victim admitted to an emergency ward, and making the acquaintance of a novice doctor, Lujan (Martina Gusman). Soon they’re an item, but it’s a toss up whether she can redeem him, or he’ll be the ruination of her, or perhaps some combination of both.

Directed by Pablo Trapero (Lion’s Den; Rolling Family), an art-house director swerving into the mainstream on his own terms, Carancho is a love story in the form of a bone-crushing, neo-noir thriller.

It’s exceptionally well put together. Trapero and cinematographer Julian Apezteguia shoot mostly in the artificial light of streetlights and hospital wards, and the film has the hard shadows of an urban nocturne.

There’s a lovely scene when Sosa first persuades Lujan to take a coffee with him, and they sit in the window of a late night café looking out at 4am. “I think my luck is changing,” he tells her. “If two cars run that red light, I’m going to kiss you.” She ups the wager to four cars, but we watch as it plays out in the same static medium shot of the pair of them: the traffic signal changing from green to red and headlights pulling by, all reflected in the glass of the café window. How many Hollywood directors would have had the patience and restraint to match that – or the faith in the actors, for that matter?

That faith is repaid in spades. Gusman (Trapero’s real life partner and producer) is no femme fatale, but a convincing working medic, attractive but as we begin to see, flawed as well as vulnerable. And Ricardo Darin – the terrific actor from Nine Queens and The Secret in Their Eyes – has that wonderful lived-in face, the kind of face that could require stitches not infrequently, but which seems more complete somehow with a bruised cheek or a torn lip.

The movie only moves into full thriller mode gradually, but by that time we’re so grounded in the reality of these characters that we don’t question the legitimacy of their desperate decisions. The comparison that comes to mind is Bringing Out the Dead, and on this occasion Trapero beats Scorsese hands-down.