El Bonaerense | Reviews | guardian.co.uk Film

Publish date: 2024-06-17
"Welcome to El Bonaerense - God help you!" This is the unpromising greeting extended to Zapa, a very scared new recruit to the closed world of the Buenos Aires city cops: macho, violent and dishonest. The smell of locker-room sweat and fear rises in waves from this tough new Argentinian movie from Pablo Trapero: a superbly persuasive thriller about the dark side of the police. It's more deadpan and downbeat than other pictures from the New Latin Cinema like Amores Perros, City of God or Y Tu Mama Tambien. But it's so overwhelmingly real-looking and real-sounding, that it hooks inside your head as well as any of them.

Zapa (Jorge Roman) is fast-tracked into the force by his cheerfully venal uncle Ismael (Roberto Posse), the former police chief - because Zapa's got a big problem. He's not a spring chicken at 32 years old, and by trade he is a provincial locksmith, whose crooked boss Polaco (Hugo Anganuzzi) has talked him into doing a tasty safe-cracking job. But this has gone horribly wrong; Polaco has vanished, leaving the hapless Zapa in the frame. So with Uncle Ismael's help, he is spirited away to Buenos Aires and on a no-questions-asked basis welcomed into the ranks of the "Bonaerense": which for him is a kind of French Foreign Legion, an academy of second chances in the big city, as long as you aren't squeamish about the way they do business. But just as Zapa is rising through the ranks and doing very well for himself in this new life, Polaco pops up and offers him a mouthwatering new opportunity: the job of a lifetime for which he is dually qualified as trained locksmith and ambitious, corrupt young copper.

The world of work and the world of crime intersect fascinatingly in this movie, and it's rare that police films spare the time to take you through the ordinary way in which uniformed lives are lived, starting with Zapa's schooling at a very joke-free Police Academy. This is where Zapa is taught how to approach a car- or houseful of suspects, with extreme caution and extreme prejudice. And in theory classes, Zapa and his fellow scholars are instructed in Article 81 of the penal code which provides for the lenient concept of unintentional homicide.

Something in Zapa's deferential manner, and the way in which he is helpfully able to unlock a jammed desk, catches the eye of a senior officer, Gallo (Dario Levy), who is appalled that this promising young man does not yet have a sidearm. With fatherly care, he actually lends him his own Browning. "A policeman without a gun is not a policeman!" he declaims and this axiom defines the gun culture of the Bonaerense. As a service to their ranks, a kind of semi-official gun salesman makes a round of the station houses, offering a range of handguns, particularly the sleek new Glock 9mm, which they can just take home with them and have the cost deducted from their salaries - a kind of Tupperware weaponry party. As Zapa is to find out, they adore firing them into the air on festive occasions of self-congratulation, at suspects, and, in the film's final act, at each other.

In parallel with his horrible new professional career - doubly fraudulent both in terms of its corruption and the fact that he is himself a wanted criminal - Zapa enjoys a flowering love affair. Mabel (Mimi Ardu) is a sexy instructor at his training academy (with a 10-year-old son) who seduces Zapa and with whom he almost believes he can have a family. But their relationship turns sour as Zapa becomes more infatuated with the masonic culture of graft: a culture that director Trapero invests with a weirdly comic aspect in the form of Caneva (Anibal Barengo), an officer who regales everyone with bizarre theories of the universe that he has plagiarised from Erich von Daniken. This film actually has one of the most brutally bathetic laugh lines of the year; when Polaco, the unprepossessing old locksmith resurfaces to tell Zapa about his new criminal scheme, he is madly excited about the way his former protege fits into it: "I couldn't sleep for thinking about you - not even after a wank!"

El Bonaerense is in many ways similar to I Love a Man in Uniform, the excellent 1993 movie by David Wellington about a bank employee and part-time actor who gets a role as a cop in a TV show and starts sneaking his uniform home in the evenings and wearing it in the street for the secret buzz it gives him - then gets involved in some seamy cop business. Like him, Zapa is an outsider, an impostor whose paradoxical success gives us a kind of hyper-real, almost anthropological sense of what being a police officer is: its traditions, its cultures, its tribal markings. Added to this is Trapero's shrewd and observant sense of the messiness of real life, and his refusal of the cop-drama cliches. His Zapa isn't a pure young man who becomes corrupted, nor is he a diehard crook who adores the effrontery of becoming a policeman. He is just a muddled, vulnerable man who has stumbled into a situation that is as preposterous as it is villainous. And in doing so, becomes the star of an outstanding human drama about career criminals in and out of uniform.

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