A TWO-THIRDS competent and believably tough movie, Carancho (it means “vulture”) has industrial-grade seaminess. Passages seem like a more authentic version of what Scorsese was after in Bring Out Your Dead. Director Pablo Trapero prowls Buenos Aires’ nightscapes with a pair of troubled guides. Sosa (Ricardo Darin) is a crooked lawyer. He’s introduced to us just as he’s getting the tar beaten out of him by a pair of potential griftees. Possibly, they’ve been grifted already and are taking revenge. Lucidity isn’t Trapero’s cardinal virtue.
Lujan (Martina Gusman), very pretty in a nerdy, melancholy way, is a dog-tired doctor working endless night shifts. She scrapes injured people off the pavement and into her ambulance. During breaks, she eases the pain of her work by shooting up something or other into the veins of her foot. Sizing up the couple, one remembers Nelson Algren’s advice: “Never sleep with anyone whose problems are worse than your own.” It’s hard to figure who has it worse: the incompetent scamming ambulance chaser or the terminally fatigued physician. Simply trying to survive, Sosa unleashes a spiral of insurance frauds attracting bigger and more dangerous scavengers on either side of the law.
Darin, best known as the courtly lawyer in The Secret in Her Eyes, is an interestingly raffish figure, a kind of Mastroianni/capybara hybrid. His honest homeliness is tenderized; everyone uses him as a punching bag. But he possesses enough spirit to make it plausible that Lujan would fall for him. He demonstrates some choice Latin suaveness during a game he plays with Lujan: she has to concede a kiss if they witness five cars running a red light from where they’re sitting, at 5am in a coffee shop.
And when Sosa finally revenges himself on a tormenter, we can believe every bloody moment of his attack. The jagged narrative, skipping too many vital connections, can make you lose your way. At the finish, Carancho’s narrative is even more bewildering than usual for a story told about the hours between midnight and dawn.
Unrated; 107 min.
