A screen thriller set in an especially dark time in Buenos Aires.


For “The Secret in Their Eyes,” the road to this year’s Academy Award as best foreign-language film began in the courtrooms of Buenos Aires. Eduardo Sacheri, a writer of the movie’s screenplay and the author of the novel on which it is based, spent five long years in bureaucratic toil there, collecting stories of injustice and intrigue.

All that is familiar territory to readers of thrillers or fans of film noir. But when the Argentine director Juan Jose Campanella read the novel in 2005, he also saw a chance to do something different: make a movie that had “soft-boiled guys in a hard-boiled story.”

“The Secret in Their Eyes,” which received its premiere last August in Argentina and is being released internationally this year, is thus both a detective story and a tale of unrequited love. Shuttling back and forth between the mid-1970s and the late 1990s, it focuses on the relationship between a judicial investigator from the lower classes and his boss, a refined, feminist judge, as they attempt to solve a grisly rape and murder.

When an Argentine film is set in the 1970s, it is usually a signal that the nasty politics of the era will be driving the plot. In this case the investigating team discovers that dark forces have taken control of the judicial system even before the March 1976 coup that overthrew an elected Peronist government and put the military in control .

“What was especially interesting to me was that we were working in a period little visited by film and literature, the period right before the dictatorship,” said Soledad Villamil, who plays Judge Irene Menendez Hastings.

Ricardo Darin plays Benjamin Esposito, the investigator who carries the story. He has become a specialist in characters in a state of emotional exhaustion or existential crisis .

“For me it’s more satisfying to tell stories of people who struggle to survive, to rise above their problems and circumstances,” Mr. Darin, 53, said in a telephone interview from Buenos Aires.

A third character, who sees Benjamin and Irene falling in love before they realize it themselves and unearths the clue that appears to crack the case, is Sandoval, the judge’s alcoholic assistant. He is played by Guillermo Francella, perhaps Argentina’s most popular comedian .

“Comedy was just a career circumstance, and for a long time, I’d been looking for different content, for other things to do,” Mr. Francella, 55, said in a telephone interview from Hollywood. “This was the ideal character: a drunkard who seems to be clueless but is in reality intelligent and observant, and in a certain sense ends up becoming the hero of the movie.”

The actors and Mr. Campanella lived through the repression of the 1970s themselves . But Ms. Villamil, now 40, had particularly vivid memories.

“My father was a Trotskyite, ” she said. “As a result my family was constantly on the move, in the city and all over the country, and my childhood was one of isolation from my surroundings. Nobody could know where we were, not even my grandparents for the longest time.”


By LARRY ROHTER