One of the most interesting films at the New Directors and New Films (ND/NF) film festival in New York in 2021, it was “Goshawk”, a Swiss-Franco-Argentine co-productionfrom the Swiss director Andreas Fontana.
When this festival started in 1972, the purpose was to show film lovers what emerging directors were around the world. Names like Wim Wenders, Michael Haneke, Chantal Akerman, Pedro Almodóvar emerged. This purpose remains the same after 50 years. In 2021, 27 feature films and 11 short films participated in the festival, from places as diverse and distant as Ethiopia, Georgia, China, Malta, or the Dominican Republic.
What “Azor” tells happens in the Argentina during the last military dictatorshipat a time assumed to be the late 1970s.
The perception of Andreas Fontana it does not correspond only to that of the European who sees in Argentina a slight resemblance to what he already knows. He knows that there is more mystery in that apparent similarity, and that even Argentines find their own country sometimes incomprehensible.
Usually when I see a film shot in Argentina by foreigners, I immediately look for representation defects, that is, what is shown and is not, but in this case I only had objections with the opening scene.
The particularity of Fontana’s point of view probably comes from the fact that he is the grandson of a banker. He must be well versed in the world of private banking, which he clearly distinguishes from commercial banking. The beginning of his interest in this subject were the reports that his grandfather wrote about his visits to Argentina during the last military dictatorship, written reports, I suppose, with numbers and the arid and factual vocabulary of finances. .
The history
“Goshawk” tells the story of a Swiss banker, Yvan De Wiel (Fabrizio Rongione), who arrives with his wife Inés (Stéphanie Cléau) in Buenos Aires to replace another banker, René Keys, who mysteriously disappeared. There is no explanation for this absence, which remains in the uncertain terrain of speculation. It is somewhat strange that the swiss governmentthrough its diplomats, no longer bother to find out how one of its citizens vanished, in a time of torture and murder, but that vagueness immediately indicates that this film is not going to be about the search for a disappeared person.
Very soon it becomes known to which social class Yvan De Wiel belongs. A comment from Inés, his wife, makes it clear: De Wiel has to meet a certain Farrell (Ignacio Vila), a presumably important client, one of those possible opportunistic politicians of the moment. Yvan shows Inés a blue suit and asks her opinion; she in turn asks what kind of person Farrell is, and based on the answer given by her husband, she advises him to wear something cream-colored, something in bad taste, so that Farrell does not think that he is “snobing” him. The advice shows a characteristic of this banker’s wife: she catalogs people quickly -and her husband needs those observations-, but it also suggests the social class of the marriage: they know the ruthless codes of clothes and their colors, and what they themselves , in the group of people to which they belong, determine as vulgar.
The terms they use from time to time could be another indication, a cipher language only for a few in Geneva’s banking elites, with expeditious phrases and words summarizing more complex concepts. The word “hawk” is one of them. The meaning: a warning to act and speak carefully (ironically, in reality it is also a medicine to lower high blood pressure); “faire comme cousin Antoine” (do like cousin Antoine) is another, and alludes to the attitude of the person who sees someone they know first, but does not want to say hello and pretends not to see him.
From the beginning of the film, marriage feels comfortable among rich Argentines, a social environment that is not theirs, but in which they obviously do not feel less. Yvan alludes to the feeling he had upon arriving in Argentina of being like Cortés, the conqueror who takes away the goods of a country, but it is a comment in passing, without guilt. If he is a conqueror avid for gold, at least he has his own castle where he can invite his wealthy client, the widow Lacrostegui (the surname sounds like a mixture of those of Amalia Lacroze and Albano Harguindeguy, Videla’s Minister of the Interior).
Fontana’s vision is that of a director who sees the rich from an evaluating perspective and not one that criticizes, as the cinematographic view of wealth tends to be. A view that he often indulges in because it’s nice to look down on people with lots of money, and since most of the time they deserve it, it’s a comforting look down. It’s as if it allows us to think: well, we’re not rich, but at least we’re not as gross as them.
In this film that thought is complicated. The rancher Augusto Padel Camon (Juan Trench) destroyed by the disappearance of his daughter in the military repression, has no qualms about saying what he thinks of his other two children. Perhaps because he suffers he no longer needs to hide the reality of how useless they are, with his crazy projects. Both seem like the prototype of the unbearable privileged, but the father is basically a country man with his feet on the ground, although with too much unreported money. Yes, his country is idyllic and even he has his own chapel where he can listen to wonderful music, but his heart is destroyed and there is no wealth to act as a balm. I don’t remember seeing actors in Argentine films in the role of ranchers who copy them with such exactness as Juan Trench when he says: “The party is getting pretty.”
The widow Lacrostegui (Carmen Iriondo) is basically pathetic. Her comments, her silence, the emptiness of her conversation – which the banker and his wife are forced to listen to as a wealthy client – everything in her unfolds an empty life. Do her gorgeous garden and her enviable pool make up for it? When the daughter tells her what she has heard: they arrested a man and took everything he had, even his horses (an apparently true fact, the 15 purebred horses ended up as the property of someone close to the Board), this woman from A certain age knows, with that way of knowing that women attribute to intuition, that her daughter is revealing something true and alarming, but she prefers not to pay attention to her, not to react, to ignore what she has just told her.
The decoration of this woman’s house is a bit surprising: the heavy sofas, the dark furniture, the unattractive objects, despite the fact that everything appears to be expensive. I always thought that money allowed for good decorators, but when she confesses what happens to her all the time, she understands why her house is so dingy and drab.
There is in the way of filming without fanfare, without underlining that Fontana has a parallel with the political situation of that time, a fictitious calm on a deceptive surface that hides terrifying and subterranean situations.
The production
In an interview he said that he had worked with 95% non-professional actors for the Argentine characters. No one overacts, everyone is naturally who they personify and the casting of María Laura Berch enriches the film because they all represent individuals who are familiar, even if we have not met them. The receptionist of the Plaza hotel, with the supposedly “sensible” opinions of the time, the man in the Circle of Arms who knows well the history of that precinct and makes an effort to speak in French as the hotel receptionist did before (that detail of always wanting to speak the foreign language), as well as Monsignor Tatoski (Pablo Torre Nilsson) in his meeting in the Circle of Arms with De Wiel. The monsignor is a dismal character, one of those gloomy men who pretend to be something other than what they are. He expresses the Junta’s speech perfectly, albeit with the unctuous tone of the collaborating clergy: the purification phase, the parasites that must be eradicated and simultaneously, the vividness of seizing the moment to enrich oneself with high-risk financial operations. Still, if his investments go wrong, if the foreign exchange market turns out to be even more unpredictable than expected, he won’t be the one to pay. Even De Wiel, who comes from a family tradition of private banking where money laundering and tax fraud are daily bread, shows some discomfort with the financial deal proposed by the monsignor. When referring to the banker Keys – whom De Wiel is replacing – Tatoski uses the past tense: “He used to say that we were all murderers”, always with a hint of a smile, or: “Let’s be greedy when others are prudent, Keys used to say that ”. To speak he uses a honeyed voice of apparent spiritual tranquility but that also hides the threat, and that the actor Pablo Torre manages to express perfectly: “Anyone has the right to be scared,” he says referring to Keys. For the viewer who got caught up in the theme of the disappearance there may even be hints in his words.
The character of Dekerman (Juan Pablo Geretto) is the living Argentine par excellence who has gotten to where he is on his own merit, probably in a fight with elbows and with a share of cynicism from Buenos Aires, which allows him to double play. He is Farrell’s lawyer, a position of some importance since he is the confidant of a man who sees himself as a possible successful politician. At the exclusive outdoor party organized by the Swiss ambassador, at which several guests are private banking clients, Dekerman pisses in the garden without any problem and is zipping up his fly when De Wiel approaches. Looking at Farrell who is further away talking to a group of people, he hints at his total contempt for the type of individual his boss represents: “A jerk, he’s paranoid on top”, but his contempt also underlies by the banker. Of course Inés, De Wiel’s wife, clearly defined him from the first meeting.
While the party is going on, the representative of the commercial bank (Credit Suisse) makes an unexpected deal with representatives of the military government, selling them a company that the Swiss want to get rid of. In the exchange between the man from Credit Suisse and De Wiel, it becomes clear that this mysterious Lazarus who appeared on a list in Keys’ apartment and that Tatoski mentioned in the Circle of Arms, is such a nefarious man that the commercial bank puts there the limit of what he is capable of doing for money.
De Wiel is not a character with psychological nuances. He is the same from the beginning to the end, and perhaps because of the custom of banking secrecy, he does not reveal anything of his person. His only problem in Argentina seems to be not being up to the task of Keys, the man he is replacing. His concern is not being considered a winner by his peers in the bankers’ competitive environment.
The end comes without fanfare, in the jungle atmosphere and with something almost malefic from the Paraná River, where more than one watering hole has survived. Here too, the characters that appear are easily located in the social register of the time. You can guess who they are from the first moment, when you see them moving in a boat down the river.
In many films directors and screenwriters (Mariano Llinás collaborated with the director) reach the end almost desperate due to the lack of options, not knowing how to end what they were showing, because the logical outcome is impossible or uninteresting and the story that counted does not lead anywhere, but it is not the case of “Azor”. The end was there from the beginning, like a crouching shadow, and it manifests itself simply with a facial gesture, but there are in that gesture a variety of underlying codes: the codes of power and money that are often those of greed and lack of ethics It is an achievement, without a doubt, that just one gesture says it all.
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