Andreas Fontana (2021)
Buenos Aires, 1981, during the period of Argentina’s ‘Dirty War’, in which the ruling military junta killed – or ‘disappeared’ – thousands of political dissidents. It’s a puzzling disappearance, that of a colleague, which brings private banker Yvan de Wiel (Fabrizio Rongione) from Geneva to the Argentine capital, though his chief mission there is to pay court to wealthy clients, including those previously looked after by René Keys, the man who’s gone missing. Yvan is accompanied by his wife Ines (Stéphanie Cléau), whose elegant calm is also designed to reassure the clientele. Swiss director Andreas Fontana’s Azor includes a sequence in which the de Wiels attend a high-class soirée, where Ines, in conversation with the hostess, explains various terms of banking slang. One of these gives Fontana his title: azor means ‘be quiet, don’t give much away’. The two women’s chat is one of the most entertaining bits in the film, which is all too aptly named. Azor, showing at the London Film Festival, is an assured debut feature but excessively restrained.
Shortly after their arrival in Buenos Aires, Yvan and Ines witness two young men being held at gunpoint in the street by militia, in broad daylight. The Swiss visitors, sitting in their chauffeured car, aren’t evidently disturbed by what they see, even though, when the camera returns to the street, one of the young men is no longer there. This economically effective piece of scene-setting introduces the ominous tone that prevails throughout Azor, so completely does Fontana eschew scenes of violence. That should make a welcome change and the description of the sinister surface of Argentine society – or the super-moneyed part of it on which the narrative concentrates – is carefully detailed. But the film feels continuously anticipatory, until its last ten minutes or so, when Yvan, briefcase in hand, makes a clandestine, nocturnal boat trip into terra incognita.
It’s no surprise this episode has been admiringly described as Conradian, especially in light of the rumours Yvan has heard that Keys has ‘gone native’, but it turns out to be remarkable in a different way. The deal Yvan seals on his heart-of-darkness excursion appears to invigorate him. On the boat’s return journey, his eyes are bright with excitement, for the first time. It’s another welcome change, in principle, that a screen banker isn’t an overt, corrupt bastard from the word go but this, too, pays diminishing dividends. Fabrizio Rongione’s Yvan is a meticulous, low-key figure whose presence aligns perfectly with Fontana’s style. He’s also a verging-on-dull protagonist. Yvan himself seems increasingly oppressed by comparisons made between him and the dodgy, charismatic Keys (Alain Gegenschatz), who appears against a painted tropical jungle background at the start but isn’t seen subsequently. Perhaps Keys was an overt, corrupt bastard. In the film’s closing shots, Yvan looks pleased that he may have begun to emulate his disappeared ex-colleague.
I have to confess another reason why I struggled to engage with Azor, which Fontana co-wrote with Mariano Llinás (who’s Argentinian). When Yvan meets with a covey of suspicious-looking types in a gentleman’s club, one member of the group chides another for failing to understand that Yvan isn’t a commercial but a private banker. In response, the financial ignoramus’s eyes glaze over: this was maybe the only moment in the film when I sympathised with a character. I’m sorry I didn’t like Azor – I wanted to, particularly in light of Andreas Fontana’s modest, engaging introduction of it at this Festival screening at Curzon Soho. That’s how I came to recognise the director on the screen, in a cameo as a bar pianist playing ‘Feelings’. The choice of that hackneyed international standard is spot on for a story with an early 1980s setting but it’s also ironic in a film where emotions, like the nefarious actions of a government, remain mostly under wraps.
14 October 2021
