Benjamin Naishtat’s Rojo And A Region’s Cinematic Reckoning

Reviewed by Alci Rengifo

The cinema of the Andes is a haunted art form. Rojo is set in the Argentina of the 1970s, plotted and shot like a classic noir, with a dark political subtext. Like many of the best recent films from this particular South American country and its neighbor Chile, the crime genre is used to tackle the legacy of the neo-fascist military regimes that governed these countries during the Cold War. This adds a layer of richness to the storytelling you don’t find in most U.S. movies or shows about detectives and murder. Noir has of course always been a vehicle to express the deepest recesses of any society, going back to films made by German expatriates in the U.S. during and after World War II. Fleeing the Nazis, directors like Fritz Lang framed the American underbelly with titles like The Big Heat and Scarlet Street. Now it is Latin American directors coming of age in the lingering aftermath of political terror who are refurnishing the genre in new ways.

It begins simply enough. One evening a lawyer named Claudio (Darío Grandinetti) waits for his wife Susana (Andrea Frigerio) at a restaurant. She’s running late and an impatient customer hassles him for the table. Claudio cedes the spot and then gives the stranger a verbal lashing. Later that night the stranger will follow Claudio and Susana on their drive home, a scuffle will ensue, a gun goes off and the couple decides never to speak about it. Respected in his community, Claudio is the kind of person his friends…