According to “Carancho,” people in Argentina are terrible drivers, a situation that has led to a healthy trafficking in personal-injury lawsuits. Get whiplash in a fender-bender, and a “carancho” — a “vulture” — will represent your case.
The film is about one such lawyer, a guy named Sosa,
who’s working for a sleazy firm of ambulance-chasers while he waits for his license to be reinstated. Sosa is played by Ricardo Darin, an experienced Argentinean star who scored a big international breakthrough when his film “The Secret in Their Eyes” won the foreign-language Oscar and made a strong impression on the arthouse circuit.
Sosa is the kind of guy who hangs around waiting for accidents to happen, but as we learn in the course of the picture, he’s also the kind of guy who isn’t above orchestrating an accident if it means generating a little income.
There’s something in Ricardo Darin’s performance that allows us to believe that this character isn’t entirely sleazy and that he might just still be a human being beneath the bad decisions.
Sosa meets a paramedic (Martina Gusman) during one of his ambulance runs and becomes interested in spending more time with her. The attraction between them isn’t entirely convincing, but must be taken on faith when one of his schemes pulls her in the direction of the more unsavory parts of Buenos Aires nightlife.
Director Pablo Trapero comes on like a South American Scorsese in this one, all nerve-jangled urban atmosphere and drug-fueled nighthawks. And a gangster around the corner to make life miserable for you.
It doesn’t all work, but the movie sure has energy, plus the baggy-eyed Darin’s performance, which surely confirms him as the Spanish-language Humphrey Bogart.
Nothing bad about Gusman’s acting, but she looks about 30 years younger than Darin, which makes their romance something of a stretch.
“Carancho” is doubly hard-hitting: It wants to create a compelling melodrama and also unlock a social issue, which swirls around the uninsured and poor victims of accidents who don’t have much choice but to align themselves with shady attorneys.
The system’s broken, Trapero’s film seems to be saying, which explains why his movie is itself so out of kilter.
“Carancho” (3 stars)
A social-issue movie from Argentina, swirling around the exhausted character of an ambulance-chasing lawyer (“Secret in Their Eyes” star Ricardo Darin) who makes some very bad decisions while falling for an honest paramedic (Martina Gusman). The movie comes on a little strong, but the Scorsese-like atmosphere is pretty convincing. In Spanish, with English subtitles.
Rated: Not rated; probably R for violence, subject matter
Showing: Metro
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