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aka - Clan, El
Argentina 2015
Directed by
Pablo Trapero
110 minutes
Rated MA

Reviewed by
Bernard Hemingway
3 stars

The Clan

Synopsis: The true story of how a seemingly model middle-class Buenos Aires family in the early 1980s served as a front for a ruthless kidnapping operation.

it's a familiar saying that truth is stranger than fiction and Pablo Trapero’s film certainly corroborates the dictum. Arquímedes Puccio (Guillermo Francella) lives the life of a devout Catholic family man but behind this facade makes a living by kidnapping and ransoming the rich.  A man’s got to make a buck you might say but Arquímedes whacks his victims rather than allowing the possibility of them jeopardizing what he takes seriously as his “career”.  If you think that’s strange well, how about this? He operates his criminal activities like a home-based family business.

From this account you might think that The Clan is a black comedy but it is fact a docu-drama based on actual events.  Not that it’s easy, at least from a cultural and experiential distance, to tell this and that is a bit of a problem.  Trapero delivers his story with deadpan matter-of-factness but a calisthenic narrative that jumps about in the early stages and a very eclectic soundtrack that mashes up The Kinks, Louis Jordan, The Inkspots and Creedence Clearwater Revival amongst others. All this means that it’s hard to know what is going on and only about a third of the way in does one start to realize that it’s no joke.

The film starts off with some archival footage that refers to the end of a military dictatorship that ran Argentina from roughly 1974 to 1983 during which time military and police forces and right-wing death squads hunted down and killed anyone believed to be associated with the political  Left.  The events we witness take place at the time of the overthrow of the dictatorship and the establishment of a democratic government.  Arquímedes, it seems, was one of the dictatorship’s enforcers and with their displacement he has gone freelance with their tacit approval. Trapero never tells us why.  It seems to be a purely commercial operation but Arquímedes doesn’t live large nor is there any psychological profiling that might suggest that he is sadistically addicted to his former métier.  Even more peculiar is why his family, principally his son Alejandro (Peter Lanzani), aid and abet him, with Alejandro, a rising rugby player even fingering a team member from a wealthy family. It’s the sort of bizarre behaviour you’d expect to find in a horror movie.  Yet whilst Arquímedes is a stern paterfamilias he’s also a devoted one (Francella's performance is magnetic in this respect) and there nothing here to suggest any kind of collective psychosis.  So why do the family go along with it?  Late in the film one of his sons returns from shearing sheep in New Zealand (as you do) and before you can say “click go the shears” he’s helping Dad boost his latest victim into the back of his van. 

Perhaps the whole thing is a study in how ideologically ordinary people are capable of justify the most heinous of acts to themselves, perhaps it’s a dark satire of bourgeois probity, perhaps it’s a portrait of right-wing sensibilities. Or perhaps it’s all of those things. It’s not easy to tell and the question keep gnawing at one when it’s over

I feel quite sure that for audiences familiar with the socio-political context of its events, particularly at first-hand, this film will resound immediately and there won’t be the problems of trying to establish its intent. For the rest of us at a considerable remove, The Clan is a bit of a headscratcher.

 

 

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