This fine, slow burn dramatic thriller from Argentina is the feature debut for writer-director Ana Piterbarg. It’s an intriguing mix of character study and crime plot; it’s set in a place of swamp and forest. It’s the kind of place that can suck you in, a place where one can get lost in its secrets and private codes.
Piterbarg shapes her plotting in subtle and graceful ways
The actual location is the Tigre Delta near Buenos Aires. Its tributaries have a sleepy beauty but the look of the film is dark. Bright colours are entirely absent from the palette, which is a smear of poo-brown and grey bleakness. Most of the action takes place outdoors but the place isn’t prettified in the lens of cinematographer Lucio Bonelli. Even the trees, often shot against a sky where the sun has been tuned out, have a creeping menace – nature looks set to take over. No wonder everyone in this movie looks more than a little desperate.
Which is to say that Piterbarg has some skill with mood and atmosphere. She has ambition too; the film has a self-conscious poetic edge. That’s a huge risk. Sometimes that kind of thing can play pompous, or worse, ridiculous. But Piterbarg makes the film’s philosophical ponderings part of the plot. And the plot is about an identity swap.
Viggo Mortensen plays identical twin brothers. Pedro lives in the swamp, in near squalor, makes honey and is having some kind of affair with twenty-something Rosa (Sofía Gala Castaglione). He is also a petty thug, assisting an older buddy, a childhood friend, Adrián (Daniel Fanego), in preying on the wealthy types who live in great modern sprawls of glass and concrete on the shores of the Delta. As the film starts, there are complications: Pedro is coughing blood, a symptom of some unspoken ailment. There is a murder, an unforeseen outcome that compromises one of Adrián’s kidnapping plots and endangers the innocuous image Pedro enjoys amongst the swamp dwellers; a hardy group of working poor not averse to turning to quick payback if pushed hard enough.
In the city Pedro’s brother Agustín, a pediatrician, lives a life of relative luxury with a wife, Claudia (Soledad Villamil), who loves him dearly. But Agustín seems plagued by doubts and sadness. The couple has arranged an adoption. At the last minute, Agustín elects to opt out of this plan; this decision sends Claudia into a tail-spin of resentment. She leaves. And then Pedro turns up on Agustín’s doorstep.
What happens next I’m not prepared to spoil. But let me put it this way: Agustín sees an opportunity in his brother’s visit to escape his special misery. He ends up back in the swamp as Pedro. He resumes an affair with Rosa and is questioned by police about Adrián – who’s disappeared – in connection with the murdered local man. At first, Agustín feels safe in his 'new’ skin, but he discovers quickly that he cannot suppress his own tender nature, a personality so different from the laconic hard-boiled diffidence of his twin.
One of this film’s considerable pleasures is absorbing the way that Piterbarg shapes her plotting in subtle and graceful ways; incidental beats of action take on rich significance as the story develops only to detonate spectacularly as the film rolls toward its savage climax.
Still, that’s not to suggest that the film is a gimmick; Piterbarg is committed to working through a story of a man undergoing an existential crisis. Everyone Has a Plan isn’t really a film noir but it’s working with a lot of the same elements. Namely, Agustín is a bit of a worm; he’s a coward and a nihilist as the film begins, but he understands himself. In returning to the place he once called home, the swamp, and sinking into its primitive emotions and authentic problems, it gives him the chance to renew a dormant passion.
I’m not sure whether we are meant to understand that Rosa knows that Pedro is not really the man she has known all along: 'Do you think it’s possible to live without hurting others?" she asks. In the context, that’s meant to be a tender admonishment of sorts. But we get the irony too: here, on the river, with this kind young girl who can afford to love him without fear, Agustín can finally find some courage. He can learn how to be decent.
It’s a longish film and some critics have claimed it plodding and full of digressions but I don’t think so at all. To be sure, it takes its time but I enjoyed getting sucked into its mystique – a blend of gothic gloom and rural toughness. The cast deliver fine performances; Mortensen and Castaglione are particularly good and Piterbarg’s technique is a sound blend of 'you are there’ verisimilitude and thriller dynamics, where every sound and image could be hiding either a threat or a promise.
