Review: "Everybody Knows"

What a strange thing it is to see a bride and groom launching their lives together and not smile. Yet here is an entire village, gazing upon wedded bliss and offering little but blank faces -- a few scowls, even.

That's an early scene in "Everybody Knows," a family drama/thriller set in a provincial town outside Madrid. Penelope Cruz plays Laura, who left her home decades ago to marry and live in Argentina. Javier Bardem is Paco, her old flame who now runs a vineyard on land her family used to own.

Laura's sister (Inma Cuesta) holds her wedding in the village church, the sort of idyllic scene we've glimpsed in a thousand movies -- the couple having rice thrown at them, everybody crying and cheering, a spectacle of pure joy. Yet writer/director Asghar Farhadi points his camera away to the townsfolk, who are not happy to witness this.

Ostensibly the story is about a kidnapping as Laura's teen daughter, Irene (Carla Campra), disappears from her bed after the reception. But really the film is about the tension rife within this seemingly idyllic place -- the secrets, the resentments, the hidden motivations that everyone seems to bear.

Farhadi ("The Salesman") uses the crime as the springboard to an exploration of this family and community. It's the sort of place where people embrace life exuberantly, drinking and dancing in abandon. Yet there's layer upon layer of rot underneath, and all it takes is one event like this to expose the maggot-infested core.

Allies become suspects, the truth is twisted and leveraged, and eventually we reach a point of total paranoia. Virtually any character in the story could be behind the kidnapping.

There is much curiosity about the absence of Laura's husband, Alejandro (Ricardo Darín), who stayed behind for work. He is known as a well-to-do businessman who made a sizeable donation to the church for repairs some years back. The local priest actually pauses the wedding ceremony to praise his generosity -- while musing if there couldn't be more forthcoming.

It seems this sentiment is decidedly non-secular, too.

The patriarch of the clan was once virtually the lord of this village, but he lost his riches due to drink and gambling, yet still thinks everyone should defer to him. Laura's older sister and her husband are very involved in the search, but they run a hotel that's barely paying enough to cover the loan. The list goes on.

The brother-in-law brings in a retired police detective friend to help, and soon fingers are being pointed all around.

Paco appears very happy with his wife, Bea (Bárbara Lennie), yet it seems clear to everyone that there's still something between he and Laura. When Alejandro finally shows up, his behavior creates new presumptions while dashing existing ones.

This is a very smart film, yet we never feel like we're being played for suckers. Farhadi nudges us rather than manipulates. The movie seems less interested in resolving what happens to Irene than seeing how her disappearance causes all the adults to reexamine the comfortable lives they've fallen into.

Gripping and yet very human, "Everybody Knows" is a whodunit that cares more about the how and why.

Review: "The Secret in Their Eyes"

The 2009 Oscar winner for best foreign language film lives up to its billing, with a labyrinthine plot that will keep even the most astute audiences guessing right up until the end.

Much like Pedro Almodovar's "Broken Embraces," which also came out last year, "The Secret in Their Eyes" has a story that flashes back and forth in time, with the present holding the secret to the past. It's a human drama that wears the clothes of a whodunit.

Director Juan Jose Campanella, who co-wrote the screenplay with Eduardo Sacheri based on his novel, craft a meditation on justice and revenge intertwined with a powerful unrequited love story. The parallel timelines, set in the mid-1970s and a quarter-century later, touch on some Argentine historical themes that may be fuzzy to American audiences.

Benjamin Esposito (Ricardo Darin) is a retired assistant prosecutor who can't let go of the past. Everything leads him back to the Morales case, a brutal rape and murder of a young wife that was the high point of his career, and the cause of his downfall into obscurity.

He goes to talk with his old boss, Irene Hastings (Soledad Villamil), who's now the district attorney, for encouragement to write a novel about the case. From the moment their eyes meet, it's clear something monumental resides between them.

Flashing back to 1974, we watch as they are first introduced and he began work on the Morales murder. Irene comes from a wealthy, politically influential family, and was appointed Benjamin's superior despite being about 20 years younger.

The other figure in their tiny three-person office is Pablo Sandoval (a wonderful Guillermo Francella), a middle-aged alcoholic who spends most of his days avoiding work. He always answers the phone with the name of a fictitious business, and claims the caller has a wrong number. (My favorite greeting was for the sperm bank. "Deposit or withdrawal?" Pablo asks.)

The relationship between Benjamin and Pablo is just lovely. Benjamin's constantly being called to pull his friend out of a bar fight or some other scrape, and lending him money to fuel his binges. He tries to be hard-hearted, but always melts when his friend needs help.

The Morales case is closed for lack of evidence, but after meeting with the woman's husband (Pablo Rago), who seems stuck in time since the murder, he has Irene pull strings to reopen it.

Unlikely clues keep the case stumbling forward. It's Pablo who notices old photographs of the murdered girl with a neighbor who always seems to be staring intently at her. They eventually track down this man, Isidoro Gomez (Javier Godino), and try to link him to the crime.

This story unfolds through Benjamin's older eyes, so we're unsure if what we're seeing is unvarnished history or colored by his recollections and emotions. He isn't certain himself, and starts poking into the mystery he long thought resolved.

Others advise him to let it go: "Forget about it. You'll have a thousand pasts and no future."
Obviously, I can't say too much for fear of spoiling the twists. Suffice to say that they kept even this veteran deducer of plots pleasantly misdirected.

With its mix of mystery, romance and political intrigue, "The Secret in Their Eyes" is quietly thrilling.

3.5 hours out of four