The Aura

Directed by Fabián Bielinsky

The Aura is a small movie with big dreams. It toys with the heist genre, wielding the audacity of a French New Wave experiment, then pads out the running time with additional levels of subtlety—some more successful than others. Argentinean director Fabián Bielinsky (who passed away this June) focuses on a nameless taxidermist (the wonderfully subdued Ricardo Darín, who also starred in Bielinsky’s first film, Nine Queens) with dreams of a life drenched in thievery and espionage, an admittedly more exciting prospect than the droll routine of stuffing fluff into expired animals. He becomes animated with childish delight while recounting his hypothetical how-to scenario for the perfect bank robbery to a colleague. As the two men stand in line to make a deposit, the plan is acted out according to the taxidermist’s inventive scheme. It isn’t an altogether untenable operation, but cold truth rushes in as our hero realizes a genuine predicament: Such ambitious movie fantasies don’t match his timid tranquility. “Who do you think you are,” mocks the colleague, “Billy the Kid?”

On top of all that, the taxidermist suffers from unpredictable epileptic seizures, leaving him immobilized at the most inopportune moments (the opening scene finds him regaining consciousness in the middle of an ATM withdrawal). Bielinksy imagines the moments leading up to these seizures with a lot of photographic flair, using extreme close-ups and subjective sound, followed by utter darkness. These moments aren’t particularly scary, just sad—like watching a mutilated tortoise vainly trying to beat the hair. This way, The Aura sets up an absorbing psychological drama. Then, with the incredulous ambition of the taxidermist’s imagination, a real heist plot comes careening into center stage.

A fatal hunting accident leaves an anonymous stranger dead—but the taxidermist quickly realizes that the accidental victim embodies his own gangster ideals, and he steps up to the task of participating in an elaborate armored vehicle robbery that the deceased criminal was poised to oversee. Everything falls into place with relative ease, as the taxidermist thinks fast on his feet and convinces the other robbers of his role in the operation. For the majority of a lengthy middle act, the action carries on with elevated thrills, as all the pieces draw together in anticipation of a final scene that matches the taxidermist’s ambition.

That scene, however, doesn’t quite arrive. The Aura flees from Ocean’s Eleven turf somewhere near the two-hour mark and keeps running for another twenty minutes. While this turning point should have arrived sooner, the final tragedy recalls some of the finer moments in Fargo. The taxidermist confuses the removed quality of his imagined criminality with the perils of reality. Consequently, his unpredictable seizures embody the quandary at hand. Inner discomfort and outward ambition blend together as a zero sum. A similar fate plagues the film, which doesn’t require the drawn-out running time to tell its compelling adventure story. Still, the taxidermist’s solitude provides a base of solemn realism. The inner stuffing of The Aura is sewn together with lively hands, but the sum of its parts lacks that organic verisimilitude.