This is a part of an ongoing project in which I watch one movie from a different country every week. 

RUNTIME: 122 Minutes

DIRECTOR: Damián Szifron

WRITTEN BY:
Germán Servidio
Damián Szifron

STARING:
Erica Rivas
Oscar Martínez
Ricardo Darín

WHERE CAN YOU FIND IT?: I borrowed a copy from the Baltimore County Public Library. If your public library has a decent collection of foreign films I’m sure you can get it from there for free. Otherwise, it is available on Netflix DVD and it is available to rent ($3.99) or buy ($12.99) on Amazon.

PLOT: A dark comedy composed of six short stories. Each story explores the extremities of human behavior in suspenseful and hilarious ways.

MEMORABLE MOMENT: Gun to my head, if I really had to choose just one I’d pick the first (and shortest) of the tales. A beautiful woman riding in an airplane discovers that the man sitting across the aisle from her is a music critic who once professionally and emotionally destroyed her ex-boyfriend. They soon realize that a woman sitting nearby was a teacher who was once very hard on him. It turns out everyone on the flight had at one time or another hurt or betrayed this emotionally unstable young man.

Guess who’s flying the plane.

IMDB TRIVIA:

• Images of wild animals appear during the opening credits. When the director’s name appears it is accompanied with a fox. The director (Szifron) stated that this was because his father loved foxes so much and used to watch documentaries on them.

• In the third tale the character of Diego (Leonardo Sbaraglia) identifies a bridge as being at the 60th kilometer between Cafayate and Salta. The scene really was filmed at that exact location. The spot became a tourist attraction after the movie was released.

•  Damián Szifrón wrote most of the tales in his bathtub. 

Anthology films are a highly effective form of filmmaking. These movies (which include works such as Pulp Fiction and Creepshow) weave together short vignettes that could theoretically be their own movies. Instead, they are reduced to ten to thirty minute segments in which all the extra fat has been trimmed away. There is minimal buildup as the audience is taken directly to the climax.

Most anthology films are connected by plot, characters or setting. There might be a frame story, or the hero of one segment might have a cameo in the next. However, Wild Tales doesn’t have a frame story. The characters don’t meet and the plots never overlap. The only connection is that every one of the “tales” includes a character who loses control and crosses the line between civilization and savagery.

Most of us get a great deal of pleasure from dramas and comedies about mild-mannered human beings who are pushed until they resort to their barbaric nature. Just look at popular shows like Breaking Bad or Dexter. These are works about characters who do the polar opposite of what society wants from them.

One of the most common pieces of advice given to aspiring writers is to have active characters. Many of us don’t want a heroine who slinks into a miserable marriage after she learns on her wedding day that her new husband has been cheating on her. We want a character like the sixth tale’s Romina (Erica Rivas) who flings her husband’s lover through a mirror.

None of the stories in Wild Tales are connected in terms of plot, but the common theme of ordinary people being pushed over the edge is so strong, each segment support the others. Nothing feels unnecessary or out of place.

I once had a film teacher who said he’d always wanted to give an assignment in which every student in the class made a short film centered around a common object. Then he would edit these films together to create one, feature length movie. Wild Tales proves that anthology films don’t need common characters, events or frame stories. All they need is a theme strong enough to support a single, unforgettable masterpiece.