The Aura Fabián Bielinsky Argentina 2005
Neurological afflictions are addictive plot-devices for films because they can mess with a character’s appreciation of time. Something that is very useful to a director indeed, as films are all about playing with time through editing: sculpting in time as the Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky put it. Having a character with a mental condition that adds its own dynamic to this manipulation of time was done famously by Christopher Nolan in Memento where the central character has amnesia impairing his short term memory.
Here Argentine director Fabián Bielinsky gives us his own take in The Aura, a film once again starring Ricardo Darin, star of Bielinsky’s previous Nine Queens. Using a neurological plot-device as well trod as amnesia Bielinsky chooses epilepsy, a condition often used in popular media as in Silas Marner.
The Aura refers to the state of mind the protagonist, an unnamed taxidermist played by Darin, experiences just before he undergoes an epileptic fit. Loosely similar to the sensations some get before suffering a migraine, the world assumes a different set of perspectives and audio clues signalling that the inevitable is about to happen: a tonic-clonic seizure or grand mal fit where consciousness is shut down.
In The Aura the audience witness two fits. Both take place in the woods. The first fit we see in detail - before, during and afterwards. The aftermath of the first fit, confirms the semi-mystical status of ‘The Aura’ as the taxidermist inadvertently, perhaps, shoots a fellow hunter in the woods triggering the film’s ‘inheritance of someone else’s life’ plot. After bragging to a colleague how easy it would be to rob a bank, Darin’s taxidermist stumbles upon the plans to rob a casino concocted by the man he shoots in the woods. He disguises the hunter’s death and proceeds with the robbery.
Crucially the film shows the taxidermist’s pre-fits in hideous detail. Noise rushes onto the soundtrack reaching an overwhelming crescendo of semi-modern classical music and the camerawork pans around Darin’s character. As is described these fits are unavoidable for the taxidermist, a moment of perfect clarity where the world assumes a savage beauty and for at least a few moments everything is clear - there will be a fit and this is the one inescapable eventuality. For the audience these seizures are equally inexorable, subject to the director’s autonomy as we are.
Undertaking a heist is a questionable endeavour for an epileptic, especially a meticulously timed and planned one where risks are anticipated and minimised. Suitably, the taxidermist’s second attack occurs during a critical moment of the robbery. Darin’s character suddenly has to warn his scurrilous collaborators about something that has been overlooked. He has another fit and unlike the first fit you don’t see him in this state. Bielinsky restrains from showing Darin prone and unconscious, giving the audience a seizure via the absence.
Epilepsy aside, Darin’s character’s motivation is fascinating but inscrutable. At the beginning whilst stuffing an animal his wife raps on the door only to be discouraged when he turns his radio up. Later he assumes the machinations of the hunter after fantasizing about committing a bank robbery. Later still when delving into the set-up for the crime he observes a robbery at a factory and follows one of the criminals as they disperse after the police response. The guy has been shot and the taxidermist watches dispassionately as he slowly dies. He has a near perfect crime thrust upon him and he lets it happen. Yet despite confessing to having a photographic memory he still overlooks a vital detail. In this sense Darin’s character is similar to many troubled yet silent protagonists in recent South American cinema from Extrano to El Custodio and Los Muertos.
The Aura climaxes in the woods in the aftermath of the heist. The taxidermist is left fleeing in the woods from the professional gangsters like one of the animals he stuffs. Once again he suffers the rushing onset of the aura. Finally the taxidermist is forced to be active, to make a decision as his inactivity and his neurological condition become as one as he avoids becoming one more carcass to be prepared for exhibition.
