A Review of ‘Wild Tales’
Six blackly comic tales of violence and revenge in Argentina defy easy categorization
I laughed, I cringed, I gasped — and I laughed, and laughed, and laughed some more. Such is the experience of watching Wild Tales, Argentina’s nomination for Best Foreign Language Film at this year’s Academy Awards. I haven’t seen Ida, the winner, but if it bested Wild Tales, I hope it’s once-in-a-lifetime fantastic, because Wild Tales is utterly brilliant in every way.
Made up of six short stories with no connection other than themes of revenge, violence, and corruption, Wild Tales feels like it could be an adaptation of an EC Comics book from the 1950s. Like the stories in, say, Tales from the Crypt, Crime SuspenStories, or Weird Fantasy, the irreverent short films that make up Wild Tales are darkly comic and are constructed around ironic twists of fate that consume their characters, as their characters are consumed by their desire for revenge.
It almost feels like spoiling the whole affair to describe the different shorts. Part of the fun of the movie is the way the tales escalate, building and playing off one another until the gloriously over-the-top finale. The setups are ingeniously simple, and it’s exciting to see if the shorts are headed for what feels like an inevitable, violent payoff, or if the story is going to take an unexpected detour into something else. Some do indeed go exactly where they appear to be going, and that can be thrilling, while others subvert expectations in fantastic ways. So, while it’s great to go into this film knowing absolutely nothing, having a brief idea of the different segments doesn’t hurt, because each story is established in the first minute or two anyway. In other words, it’s all in the execution, not the idea.
It should be noted that I, as an American, probably missed a lot. The film clearly spoke directly to Argentinian audiences, to the point where it’s become the most-seen Argentinian film of all time. (From what I can gather from various Internet articles, Argentina measures box office success by the number of tickets sold, which I think is a much better way of determining popularity than money spent, especially in this age of 3D, IMAX, IMAX 3D, etc.) Various reviews have described this film as being a satire of life in Argentina, and while I picked up on a couple things that seemed culturally specific, there are likely aspects of the film that I didn’t get.
- PASTERNAK. Wild Tales made international headlines over the last few weeks thanks to the unfortunate similarities between the plot of the opening short and the Germanwings murder/suicide-by-crash in the French Alps. Thankfully, even though it felt odd to laugh at the sight of a panicked flight attendant banging on a locked cockpit door, the scene is riotously funny. It escalates beautifully, as two people, and then a third, and finally everyone on board realizes they’re all connected, in long and convoluted ways, to a man named Gabriel Pasternak. By far the shortest of the six tales, “Pasternak” is also one of the most memorable.
2. THE RATS. Opening with a gorgeous shot of a neon-drenched restaurant in the rain, the second tale focuses once more on anger and revenge, this time between a timid waitress and the boorish diner patron with whom she has a tragic history. When the waitress explains that history to the only other restaurant employee, the tough-as-nails cook in the kitchen who may or may not have done this before, she sets in motion a revenge plot that quickly spirals out of her control. Does this guy really have it coming? Is the waitress too timid to do what needs to be done? Does anyone really win here?
The cinematography in this short is brilliant. The nighttime rainstorm and the glow of the neon play together to give the whole thing an atmosphere of surreality, as though this restaurant setting could be anywhere, could mean anything. I have a bit of a fascination with frames-within-frames, and here, characters are frequently shown watching each other through windows and in mirrors. It makes for a mesmerizing viewing experience.
3. THE STRONGEST. The third tale has an ingeniously simple premise. We begin with a well-dressed man driving his expensive-looking car down a wide-open stretch of sun-drenched highway. He soon catches up to a much slower, much less expensive car who refuses to let him pass. Instant conflict.
He eventually passes on the shoulder, and as he drives past the less-expensive car, he shouts something at the driver that the English subtitles translate as “redneck.” Instant class-based conflict.
A few miles down the road, one of his tires blows and he pulls over to try fixing it himself. And you just know, any minute that other car is going to come around the bend in the distance, and that driver is not going to be happy. The camera is constantly keeping the road behind our protagonist just out of view, so we feel like the car could appear at any moment, or else it’s slowly reframing the shot so that we can see down the road, so we think, okay, here we go, now it’s going to show up… but it just… doesn’t… get there…
Until finally, when the tension is almost unbearable, the redneck arrives. We expect a confrontation, but there’s no way we can possibly imagine the myriad ways these two men take out their aggression on one another in an almost-mythic battle of strength that escalates to zany, violent, Loony Tunes territory. This tale seems the most metaphorical, obliquely representing some kind of class conflict that probably means more to Argentinian audiences, but international viewers can certainly find amusement as well as a moral lesson in the lengths to which these men go to prove they are the strongest. Funny, violent, gross, rude, and beautifully filmed, I think this short is probably my favorite.
4. BOMBITA. The most overtly political short, “Bombita” is about a demolitions engineer whose tolerance for bureaucracy is running out. One day, while picking up his daughter’s birthday cake, his car is towed even though the curb where he parked wasn’t painted yellow. He goes to pick up his car and finds that he’s in the hole for several hundred dollars’ worth of towing fees, parking fees, and ticket fines, and even though he tries to make his case to the drone behind the bulletproof glass window, he gets nowhere. Because of this one event, his life spirals out of control: missing his daughter’s birthday party is the last straw, and his wife finally files for divorce. When his car is towed again several days later, he completely, psychotically snaps, concocting an explosive plan for revenge.
I liked this short well enough, but something about it just didn’t connect for me. Perhaps there’s something about the political undertones that I missed. As an American, I can certainly relate to feeling fed-up while waiting in line at the DMV, but maybe that’s the problem — this short feels like it functions as pure wish-fulfillment, rather than the clever kind of violent farce most of the other shorts aim for.
5. THE PROPOSAL. The darkest of the six shorts, both in tone and in lighting, “The Proposal” is the third in a row to feature violence-by-car. After a night of drunken revelry, a spoiled man-child pulls into his parents’ garage, license plate askew, blood dripping from the bumper. He’s run over a pregnant woman and he didn’t stop, and now his parents race to protect the family’s reputation. To stop their son from going to jail, they recruit the help of their gardener, the family lawyer, and a corrupt cop.
Although they live in a massive mansion, this family moves among the shadows. The garage where the car/weapon is kept is bathed almost entirely in darkness. The office where they try to hammer out the details of the father’s proposal has shuttered windows and dim lighting. It’s an interesting way of shooting a story about such dark dealings that aim to keep the law in the hands of those who can afford to manipulate it… but it feels out of place with the rest of the film. The common thread of revenge, too, is almost entirely absent from this short, kept to the background for the vast majority of its longer runtime. Probably my least favorite… and also, I suspect, a short that would mean more to audiences familiar with Argentina’s corrupt-cop problem.
6. UNTIL DEATH DO US PART. The final wild tale is perhaps the most wild of them all. A crazily melodramatic, violently sexy wedding provides the backdrop for this hysterical gender farce that explores what happens when a marriage catastrophically falls apart before the bouquet has even been tossed. Featuring a force-of-nature performance from Erica Rivas as jilted bride Romina, “Until Death Do Us Part” contains all of the themes prevalent in the earlier shorts — violence, revenge, love, anger, class disparity — only ratcheted up to 11.
This short, especially, benefits from knowing almost nothing about it before you watch, so I’m not going to say much more. This is probably the funniest wedding scene I’ve ever seen; I would have happily watched another hour of this bride making her new husband pay for what he’s done.
Even though it clocks in at more than two hours, Wild Tales is a brisk watch. The episodic structure moves things along at a fast clip, so even if you’re not enjoying one of the shorts as much as you wish you were, you know that another one is just over the horizon; it’s easy to be swept along by the quick pace. Several of the ideas could have been expanded into longer films, but I’m glad this is the way they’re presented to us instead. It’s masterful how each short deftly introduces the plot and characters, giving you just enough information to set events in motion so that you’re eager to watch them play out to their horrible, inevitable conclusions. It makes for a uniquely pleasurable viewing experience, and I will absolutely be looking for more from this director in the future.
