User Reviews

Having had a wonderful time viewing Horror titles from Latin America over Halloween,I decided to dig into the pile of Film Noir from Argentina I have. Appearing to have the shortest run time of the bunch, I got set for some less than happy days.

View on the film:

Appearing in every scene, the elegant Elisa Galve gives a magnetic turn as Zunz. Working on the site her murdered dad used to own, Galve displays a subtle touch in expressing the desire for revenge consuming her heart, pumped out in Zunz's withdrawn body language and her Noir loner downwards glances isolating Zunz from all other outside distractions from the revenge.

Walking away from the factory with Zunz, co-writer/(with Jorge Luis Borges) director Leopoldo Torre Nilsson & cinematographer Enrique Wallfisch successfully map out the days of hatred with a combination of Film Noir and Neo- Realism, which draw a stark natural low-light on a crumbling backdrop matching Zunz's crumbled state from the deaths/ killing of her parents.

Laying out the path to revenge with Zunz in dimly lit bars and countryside train tracks stamped with stylish tracking shots, Nilsson presents the fleeting few seconds where revenge is performed,being ones that don't leave Zunz feeling fulfilled, but utterly drained, walking into her hollowed ghostly life on a chilling wide final shot. Later stating that he was unhappy with how the adaptation of his "Emma Zunz" tale turned out, the screenplay by Borges & Nilsson meet Zunz with a thoughtful Film Noir character study, stripping the glamour of Femme Fatale in a narration which stabs at Zunz's growing obsession for revenge over the days of hate.

In its close concentration on an unhappily obsessed woman moving through a threat-laden environment, Leopoldo Torre Nilsson's Days of Hate often feels strangely linked to a movie like John Parker's Dementia, and not just because they're both barely more than an hour long. For sure, it's not a seamless correspondence: Dementia is fancifully and aggressively stylized, basing the woman's trauma in a grotesque family tragedy; Days of Hate is always rooted in real settings - in the factory workplace and in the Buenos Aires streets - and the motivating event is much sadder. The fascinatingly grave Elisa Christian Galve plays Emma Zunz, her father dead by suicide after he was set up as the fall guy in a theft and her mother dead from grief; she fixates on getting revenge on the conniving, sleazy factory manager who set up the whole thing. The film is dense with problematic masculinity: the men are mostly dangerous pursuers and potential or actual rapists; others are psychically unsettling (on two separate occasions she refers in voice-over to the striking sadness of someone's face) - even her love for her father manifests itself in a troublingly destabilizing form (the film shows that she remains capable of striking up connections, but they appear doomed to transience). The film is based on a short story by Borges, and although it doesn't explicitly evoke the predominant notions of his work in that it's not consciously labyrinthine or mythic, it carries a pervasive oneiric quality, the extremity of Emma's focus on her quest creating its own unsettling texture. This carries through to the ending and beyond: she evades human justice, but feels already convicted by justice of another kind, and is last seen wandering the city as if zombie-like, perpetually removed and separated. Borges was apparently disappointed in the film, but on its own terms it's unerringly full and fascinating.