This remarkable Argentine-Swiss coproduction is set in the early years of the Argentine rule-by-junta. The topic, though, is broader: the intersection of élite cupidity and brutal politics worldwide, cloaked under a veneer of high-class gentility and, of course, excruciatingly extreme discretion. The horrors endemic to the place and time in which the film is set are rendered obliquely and allusively, and all the more powerfully for that.
The film is wonderfully cast. Every character, down to the smallest non-speaking cameo, conveys worlds of meaning, often in a single frame. Most striking of all is a Catholic Monsignor who is brilliantly parodied while he acts as a searingly sinister fulcrum, lifting part of the veil that hangs over the plot, putting me in mind of the terrifying Grand Inquisitor in Verdi's opera "Don Carlos" who pushes Philip II of Spain to kill his rebellious son just as, in order to save the world, "God sacrificed his own". This sequence, set during a small gathering in one of the inner sanctums of the junta élite, tells you more about what was then going on in Argentina than could more explicit scenes set in a torture chamber or execution field, while at the same time making clear what the banker is really there to do, and what the film is really about.
The gentility and costly need for constant secretiveness (a lesson is even given in a secret argot used by Geneva bankers, including the meaning of "azor") are chillingly conveyed by the lead couple, played by Fabrizio Rongione and Stéphanie Cléau. He perfectly personifies the suave, ultra buttoned-down Swiss private banker, to the manor born, providing a master class in understated movie acting, conveying reactions with just the subtlest twitch of an eyelid or a small corner of his mouth. Her character is highly intelligent, ambitious, icily disciplined, both a judgmental antagonist and a tremendous resource for him, sussing out situations in which she is, even more (you sense) than usual in the macho world of the Argentine ruling classes (old and new), relegated to the sidelines, to the point of being more or less politely dismissed whenever serious business is to be discussed. (At one point, he is told to get rid of her prior to a key meeting: "no women".) She is perforce devoted to her husband yet bitter at the role she must play. Her greatest line, already widely quoted in reviews, comes when she is told by a tough-as-nails Argentine matriarch that she can see that "your husband loves you very much" (which is actually, you assume, a leading question), and Cléau, still smooth and icy but with just the subtlest flash of anger, responds., "Yes, he and I are but a single person. [Perfectly-timed pause.} And that person is him".
The film is in French and Spanish, with many of the Argentine characters (quite credibly, given their social standing) completely at home in French, while Rongione seems to have more than serviceable (though not perfect) Spanish. (Cléau seems to have almost none, which, if anything, serves to enhance the acuity of her observations.) The dialogue shifts constantly between the two languages, often in midsentence, none of which is flagged in the English subtitles even though, like every cue in this subtlest of movies, each shift conveys meaning.
Similarly, the film brings together two different, but intertwined and indeed interdependent, worlds. One is that of élites everywhere, but in this case of a post-putsch Latin American country among whom all are living in terror, though of what, or of whom, differs according to the person's social or political standing. The other is that of global private bankers, in this case Swiss, who provide vital services by protecting and processing wealth, whether gained by plunder by the current holders of power or inherited by established élites, presumably from plunder by their ancestors. Both worlds are scary, and their scariness is brilliantly conveyed, which is what makes this film so compelling. Though some of the in-jokes will be most amusing to Swiss viewers (outsiders will not necessarily spot the full contempt conveyed when one suave upper-class Swiss tells another that a third colleague is "from Zug"), the key structural role played by bankers worldwide in their dealings with the politically powerful and with the very rich, and the ways they help engineer mutations from one category to the other, could not be made clearer.
Without resorting to spoilers, I think it can be said that what's most striking about the film's final sequence is the sudden banality of the message it appears to convey. After all that intrigue and complexity, you wonder, it this really what it was all about? And the film's answer appears to be, "Well, of course, what did you think?"
