Beginning with a chills-inducing Twilight Zone-esque vignette aboard an airliner and ending with the quintessential disrupted wedding reception, Wild Tales was a deserved Oscar nominee for Best Foreign Film. Superbly directed with a jaundiced eye by Argentinian Damian Szifron, its six separate stories share a penchant for the perverse side of human nature. Overflowing with a cornucopia of black humor, the film is spiked with outbursts of startling if cartoonish violence. I don’t think I’ve had more fun watching a film this year.
Wild Tales takes on road rage, frustration over unfair parking authority practices, revenge at a roadside diner, the corrupt sense of priviledge of the very wealthy, and a newlywed’s strange discovery during a wedding reception of her partner’s infidelity. The common denominator in each story? A character feels grossly victimized by injustice. Yet this movie is about as far from a bleeding heart social drama as a film can get. Szifron, so adept at staging a realistic romp, averts any uneasiness over his possibly having too much fun mocking perfectly reasonable human beings who simply suffer from an overdose of misguided passion.
Each section features a hard-as-nails centerpiece character. A stern music critic, Salgado (Dario Grandinetti) anchors the airline scene–the less about which you know going into the movie the better. Next is the elderly diner cook (Rita Cortese) who pushes a revenge-seeking yet cautious waitress (Julietta Zylberberg) to transform her disgust with a victimizer from her past into grotesque action. In the bizarre chain of events (details of which I’ll also refrain from revealing) on a lonely highway emerges another tough customer (Walter Donado) who is totally off the wall yet consistently credible. Characters in Wild Tales come to find themselves in situations where seemingly innocent events suddenly give them far more than they bargained for. In the next story an obsessive character (veteran actor Ricard Darin) with anger issues goes up against surly public servants enforcing usurious towing fees. He seems to unravel, even ends up losing his job and wife, yet somehow finds a reservoir of special nastiness to fight off ostensibly unbeatable foes. Similarly, when a bride (Erica Rivas) discovers at her wedding reception that one of her female guests was indeed her husband’s mistress, her reactions and the resultant chaos produce both surprise and laughter, and, also, a reluctant identification with her razor-sharp zeal for payback.
Is Szifron finally conceding his aloof stance from all this degradation in the segment where a wealthy man (Oscar Martinez) tries to buy his way out of ruin and disgrace after his son is involved in a hit-and-run accident? In this one tale where humor is conspicuously absent, greed trumps itself with several twists that produce an eerily serious, ultimately sick feeling that humanity’s worse impulses are indeed even far worse than ever imagined. The scene soberingly frames in a different light the rest of the film’s outrageous hilarity. For a moment….Yet the wedding scene is so flat-out depraved and ironically life-reaffirming that Wild Tales ends on a note that perhaps redeems us humans after all.