Carancho (2010)
Certified: 18
Duration: 107 minutes
Directed by: Pablo Trapero
Starring: Ricardo Darín, Martina Gusmán, Carlos Weber, José Luis Arias, Fabio Ronzano, Loren Acuna, Gabriel Almiron, Jose Espeche
KRS release
Argentina’s Carancho starts off promisingly but it soon loses itself in its effort to upstage the audience’s expectations.
The word ‘carancho’ refers to a vulture-like bird of prey that feeds on carcasses. Directed by Pablo Trapero, the film tackles the subject of corrupt medical authorities and twisted insurance companies, but it gets lost in petty Hollywood elements such as a shaky love affair, a twist ending and a shootout.
Trapero’s film takes on the conventions of film noir as it focuses on Argentina’s high car accident rate.
The main character is Sosa (Ricardo Darín), a middle-aged man who is an ambulance-chasing lawyer and who apparently cares for his clients.
However, he comes up with scams, in conjunction with hospital staff and his insurance company, to get his clients to sign as quickly as possible after anaccident, in order to get a sum of money.
That is when he meets Lujan (Martina Gusmán), a young doctor who is working double shift, is tired out and is injecting herself to keep up with the hospital’s gruelling work.
She meets Sosa at the scene of an incident and believes she can turn over a new leaf with him.
But one day she finds that a scam worked by Sosa results in one of the participants’ death. Sosa tries to win her over again and in doing so, start a new life.
This means helping out a particular set of victims and going against his employers and all the other money-hungry low-lifes that take a slice of the pie each time a road accident occurs.
This will result in moments of retaliation between the two parties with Lujan caught up in the middle.
What I found exaggerated were the lengthy shootouts and how Sosa coped with his wounds, almost in soap-opera fashion.
Both Darín and Gusmán never grab the audience’s sympathy but rather their pity.
The end result is a sombre and cold film that seems to shroud itself in its own sense of importance.
The main problem lies towards the end where it piles on the over-the-top circumstances, with the film emerging to be overly melodramatic and too inconsistent for its own good.