The Aura Tagged Articles at Cinematical

The Aura, the second feature from Argentine director Fabián Bielinsky, is so strange and lovely that his recent death at the young age of 47 seems even more tragic for all it has denied the world of cinema. Bielinsky's final work is a film that relishes distance and isolation, glorying in the experiences of a man who lives apart from the world around him. Like its main character, The Aura exists in a sort of suspended animation: It offers no backstory, and there is no future suggested by its ending. It simply exists, a work of such power and grace that its needs no external support.

The film centers on an unnamed taxidermist (the note-perfect Ricardo Darín) who, like the film, exists in a vacuum. We know he is epileptic because the movie opens with him on the ground, after a seizure. He rarely acknowledges his condition, but it dominates his life and is a source of both frustration and perverse joy. We know he has a wife because she leaves him, but we see her only once, fleetingly, though a pebbled glass window. And we have no idea why she left, or what their relationship was like. (At one point, the taxidermist makes a general attack on abusive husbands and, though at the time his words seem aimed at another, there's a such an odd, personal depth to his loathing that one wonders -- fleetingly, but the question is there -- if, perhaps, we've just been told exactly why his wife left.) Apart from his wife, the taxidermist seems to know a single other person: A big, loud colleague of whom he's clearly not very fond. They are forced into a certain camaraderie because of their shared profession, but it's an obvious effort for the taxidermist to even engage in basic social niceties. When his colleague asks how he's been, and what he brought to the museum at which they meet, the taxidermist answers him, and then falls silent. It's not until several seconds later that he remembers something is expected of him, and offers an awkward "And you?"

Argentenian director Fabián Bielinsky, director of the criticially well-received crime caper Nine Queens, died Wednesday in Brazil of a heart attack at the age of 47. Bielinksky was in Brazil casting for commercials; he died in his hotel room. Nine Queens, a swindle story about a con to sell a sheet of  nine rare stamps (the "nine queens" of the title), was compared by many critics to David Mamet's films, especially to House of Games. Bielinksy had only made two films: Nine Queens (2000) and The Aura (2005), which was recently acquired by IFC First Take, the day-and-date distribution arm of IFC Entertainment.

[ via The IFC Blog ]

Whether you like day-and-date releasing or not, it's hard to argue that the approach isn't leading to the acquisition of films that might otherwise be ignored by American distributors. For example, a couple of weeks ago IFC picked up the rights to Destricted, an artsy porn flick generally thought to be both un-promotable and un-releasable in the US. And while it's not bought any porn since then, IFC is continuing to add niche films to their stable of releases: They recently acquired US rights to a pair of films from Argentina, and will release both in theaters and on cable via their First Take arm (though no dates have yet been announced).

The first, Derecho de familia (Variety gives it two different English translations, so we'll just stick with the Spanish for now), is the third in a trilogy about fatherhood from director Daniel Burman (and, no, he other two weren't released in the US) and "revolves around a thirtysomething man and his roles as father and son." The second acquisition is a crime thriller entitled The Aura, about "a shy taxidermist who secretly dreams of executing the perfect robbery," and gets to live his dream when he takes over the armored-car robbery that had been planned by a man he accidentally kills. Got that? Based only on this French trailer (and a great review in Variety, from the film's screening last year at the San Sebastian Film Festival), it looks dark and intense and awesome -- thank you, IFC.