An aura of respectability

Ironically, the film's most compelling and tension-fraught scene is a purely speculative scenario in which nothing ever actually happens. Stuck in a long line at the bank en route to a weekend hunting trip, Esteban Espinosa (Ricardo Darín, the less appealing of the two stars from Nine Queens) confesses to a friend that he makes a hobby of devising foolproof murders and robberies, rattling off a detailed, improvised plan to knock off the very branch they're currently patronizing. This surfeit of imagination proves unexpectedly useful a bit later on, when Espinosa, deep in the forest, mistakes the owner of his rustic hotel for a deer, accidentally killing him. For it's soon revealed that the deceased, in a rather neat coincidence, was preparing for an elaborate casino heist—which is to say, for an honest-to-goodness real-world crime that our perpetual dreamer of an antihero can appropriate and improve. The only question is whether he can vacate his own head long enough to take concrete, irreversible action in a world that he's observed from a remote distance for his entire life.

The primary rap against Nine Queens, in which a veteran small-time con artist adopts a particularly wily mark as his new protégé, was that it had little to offer apart from the surface-level machinations of its corkscrew plot. (It also featured a climactic "twist" that any moderately attentive viewer could see coming halfway through reel one.) As if stung by such criticism, Bielinsky fairly drowns The Aura in portentous atmosphere, so that everything seems to be happening underwater, and in slow-motion to boot. His notion of character, meanwhile, tends toward the laughably overdetermined. Q: How can I ensure that the audience will understand that Espinosa has detached himself from life's vital essence? A: Make him a taxidermist. Q: How might I underscore Espinosa's fragility and control issues? A: Why, make him—it's hard to even type this without giggling—an epileptic taxidermist. Clunky symbolism like this wouldn't pass muster in an undergrad creative writing course. Why is it being received here with so many solemn nods of approval?

Well, I've already proffered my less-than-gracious theory. The Aura does boast a handful of memorably hypnotic moments, foremost among them the eerie pre-seizure reveries—equal parts terror and tranquility—that give the film its title. On the whole, however, this is a pedestrian, strained stab at artfulness by a filmmaker whose sensibility was deeply rooted in facile genre pleasures, commendable only for its good intentions. Had Bielinsky lived to make several more pictures, it's entirely possible that he would have taken this ungainly alchemy in an exciting new direction—who can say? Certainly I didn't think "good riddance" when I heard the news of his death, though The Aura had bored me into a near-coma at Sundance six months earlier. But it seems to me that I can best respect Bielinsky's memory by giving his movie the same negative review I would have given it otherwise. He failed twice, but I wish he'd had the opportunity to try again.