Wild Tales (Relatos Salvajes)

**Spoiler Alert**
Director: Damian Szifron/Starring: Dario Grandinetti, Maria Marull, Ricardo Darin and Leonardo Sbaraglia

The Oscar-nominated Argentine film Wild Tales, which only just arrived at a local theater, is so irresistible, with its absurdly comical situations and characters who often seem trapped in some sort of O.Henry-like universe. Having now had the distinct privilege of seeing it, the thought that I could have missed it makes me shudder. Very few films from 2014 were as alive and riveting as director Damian Szifron's masterwork. You might instinctively recoil from my fulsome praise, but trust me, you'll exhaust yourself searching for superlatives to apply to Szifron's film.

Divided into six, twenty-minute vignettes, the stories run continuously without intertitles and with only a brief fade between tales to serve as narrative demarcation.

The story that precedes the opening titles takes place on a commercial airline. A man strikes up a conversation with an attractive woman sitting across the aisle and before long, the two discover they happen to share a mutual acquaintance with a man from their pasts who they wronged in their respective ways. Soon, the rest of the passengers find to their amazement that they all know the man in question and have also served him ill. In a brilliant comic twist, the passengers discover the man they all know is locked in the cockpit and hell-bent on crashing the plane. Meanwhile, an elderly man sitting with his wife in their backyard notices the jet is headed in their direction and as it edges near, it becomes certain they won't escape the collision. A freeze-frame of the jet touching down--on the couple--is accompanied by the film's title. The darkly funny opening, which blends comic sensationalism and mild surrealism, gives the audience the sense that anything can and will happen in the vignettes that follow.

The other stories hardly disappoint. In another tale, a man of some means attempts to pass another motorist on a quiet, country road. The other driver swerves to avoid being passed. When the man negotiating a pass finally executes the maneuver, he gives the other driver the finger and shouts an insult. Shortly thereafter, his tire goes flat and while fixing it, the other driver arrives. What follows is a hilarious tale of road rage that morphs into a melee. How it ends is no less absurd than what comes before, as the driver's mutual hostility becomes sidesplittingly funny.

In the third tale, a young woman and her friend run a roadside diner. When the younger woman recognizes a patron who once did her father grievous harm, she contemplates retribution before reconsidering. Unfortunately, her tougher, less scrupulous partner urges her to place rat poison in his food. As the man eats heartily, the two women begin to ponder the poison's efficacy. When the younger woman's conscience gets the better of her, the man's son arrives to share a meal with his father. The tangled situation reaches a violent, fever pitch then concludes in a denouement where we see the younger woman and the son sitting side by side in an ambulance, contemplating the aftermath.

At this point in the film, Szifron has gained our full attention as the audience eagerly awaits the next tale. His wonderful, twisted sense of irony is firmly established as the fourth tale begins.

An engineer specializing in demolitions finds himself at odds with his city's maddening bureaucratic apparatus. On his way home to his daughter's birthday party, his car is towed and impounded. Sorely vexed, he joins a long line of motorists paying parking fines. In an effort to contest the ticket with an unyielding and unsympathetic clerk, he claims lawful abidance, only to become hostile when his pleas fall on deaf ears. To make his life more miserable, he finds he has arrived late to his daughter's birthday for which his wife and daughter show little patience. His further attempts to challenge the ticket result in a minor cause celebre, which leaves him jobless and on the outs with his family.
Driven to extremes, he uses his skills in demolitions to avenge himself on the city's DMV, with humorous and again, O.Henry-esque results.

The fifth tale in the film takes a more serious turn as the son of wealthy man is involved in a hit and run that leaves a pregnant woman and her unborn daughter dead. Desperate to keep his son from a lengthy prison sentence, the man, his wife and his lawyer hatch a devious plan whereby their long-serving groundskeeper will claim responsibility for the crime while receiving substantial remuneration from his employer. But as the crime sparks a media frenzy, the lawyer and the groundskeeper are overcome with greed, demanding more money for their involvement. Feeling squeezed and extorted, the father tries to urge his son to confess. The end result proves to be tragic as the devious scheming comes to naught.

The last tale recovers the film's oddball sense of humor as a young bride discovers her husband's infidelity during her wedding reception. Worse still is the presence of the other woman as an invited guest, who her husband has taken to chatting up during the festivities. How the young bride responds to the outrage makes for delightful chaos as the wedding reception becomes bedlam. And what seems like an irrevocable mess for both the couple and the families begins to show slow signs of recovery in the aftermath.

Szifron, with only a few films under his belt, shows directorial mastery and a showman's knack for spectacle; leaving the audience with a giddy sense of wonder. This includes his talent for not giving the audience too much of what it wants--or expects. He knows when and how to end each tale. Before we can collect our wits and catch our breath, we're carried headlong into the next story.

What is the connective thread? What are the themes? The film tells stories that show mankind at its most animalistic. Over the opening credits, we see various wild animals, which is entirely appropriate. Szifron recognizes man is hardly different than his bestial brethren in its savage pursuit of self-preservation and self-interest. But he also recognizes the foibles, flaws and characteristics that are peculiarly human: a sense of cruelty, vengefulness and jealousy. But a few of our nobler traits also emerge, such as our capacity to love and forgive, as the bride in the last tale proves. Though we are the deadliest species the world has ever known, we are also blessed with a conscience, as the young woman in the diner and the father whose son commits a vehicular homicide attest. If we are animals, Szifron may be saying, we are also a fascinatingly complex mammal; a primate both savage and cunning--as the Engineer effectively demonstrates--but one also capable of lethal folly.

Some of the films also take a stab at class conflict, which is subtly and cleverly depicted in the road rage and vehicular homicide vignettes.

Szifron manages to celebrate, condemn and lampoon humanity beautifully in his six tales. Watching Wild Tales is an intoxicating experience. The film also has resonance and may leave you feeling like you just stepped off one of those amusement park centrifuge rides. You exit the ride feeling light-headed and exhilarated...and you feel like doing it again.