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Fabián Bielinsky, 1959-2006
By Diego Lerer

In the world of Fabián Bielinsky, behind every corner there was darkness. The unexpected, the impossible, the surreal could come up at every turn. In El aura, his second and, sadly, last film, the main character walks in the woods, surrounded by shadows and fog, with only flashes of light illuminating the tall trees. The light is out there — the world, the possibility of happiness — but he can't see it. His mind is somewhere else: planning the next step of an elaborate robbery, stealing the identity of the man he just killed. Obsessive to the point of memorizing every number, every face, every step he had to walk to get out of the woods, the protagonist cannot, finally, control everything that's around him. Because real life, real things, can't be controlled, processed, written down on a piece of paper and handled as if it were a map, where space and time are fixed and easy to follow. His mind controls him, but can't control the world.

At some point during the night of June 28th, Bielinsky died in his sleep. He was in a hotel room, in Sao Paulo, Brazil, working on a commercial. Due to a heart condition, he had stopped smoking a few months before, trying to lead a healthier lifestyle. But that darkness that was always a part of his personality and his movies showed up unexpectedly. And that wasn't an 'aura', nor an epileptic fit, much less a dream. Fabiàn died in the real world and his passing is something that, like his films, people still try to understand for days on end, a weird puzzle that, in this case, doesn't make any sense.  

A man of pleasant manners, a virtual library of knowledge about cinema, an obsessive to the core, Fabián was also a good friend and a kind human being, probably the kindest filmmaker I met in this business in the last fifteen years. Since his wife is a very close friend of a cousin of mine, we used to call each other, jokingly, 'cousins'. But it never felt forced. To talk to Fabián was like talking to an old member of the family, an old soul, a guy you felt you knew even if you didn't really know him that well.

	"Nine Queens"

You can see in his two films — that masterpiece of screenwriting that is Nine Queens and the extraordinary and piercing investigation in POV cinema that is El Aura —, that his mind was always somewhere else, maybe a few steps ahead of yours, like a great chess player that has the entire game in his mind before even moving the first piece. And, boy, he was obsessive. He could be working on a script for three or four years. He would shoot and reshoot every scene until it looked exactly the way he had conceived it in his mind. He fought to maintain a very long cut of El aura (at the expense of a tighter editing that would have given the film a better and longer commercial run) because he believed that was the only way the audience could get into the mind of the protagonist. He also made the entire film from the main character's point-of-view, forcing the audience to be outside the main action during long sequences. But he had a vision of what he wanted. And he stuck to that, with great results.

The protagonist of El Aura (Ricardo Darín) was epileptic. And Marcos, the main character of Nine Queens (played by the same, great actor) suffered a similar sort of confusion about what was going on around him in the film. Thinking they know when they really don't. Thinking they can when they really can't. Those were the Bielinsky guys. Control freaks, obsessive guys, filmmakers.

His life had more points in common with his films that we were led to believe. As our colleague Cristina Nord wrote in a very perceptive piece in the FIPRESCI website — when El aura won our prize in the Havana Film Festival — "the idea that the film is entering a terrain that is bordering on the fantastic is reinforced by Esteban's epileptic seizures, moments he describes in one conversation as extremely special: he steps into another world, where he sees clearly what will happen but cannot do anything to prevent it."

El aura was also a great step to show his qualities as a filmmaker. A long time assistant director to some well-known Argentine filmmakers (Carlos Sorin and Eliseo Subiela, among others), and with some experience in advertising, he was able to show a strong command of storytelling in Nine Queens. But that film was — still is — basically a great script, shot in a very classical, unobtrusive way, helped by a career-making performance by Darín. No wonder it was compared to the films of David Mamet, another great storyteller not particularly famous for his visual skills.

!El Aura"

El aura was a different thing altogether. Standing apart from the precise logic of Nine Queens, Bielinsky dared to abandon the big city and go to the woods in Patagonia, when time, space and events are harder to predict. The wildlife, the guns, the mysterious animals, the traps were not as easy to handle as they had been when the main character (who is never named during the film) was in Buenos Aires working as a taxidermist. These animals, these people, these guns were real, and they could turn things around at any given time. Even the shooting of the film ended up being more difficult than the production company had predicted: they couldn't control the weather, the light, the hundreds of things that can go wrong when you are out in the wilderness.

With El aura came a different approach in terms of screenwriting, a decision to let things more open to interpretation, to avoid closing all the doors to the audience for a satisfying and conclusive ending. With that, also came a more lyrical approach to filmmaking. Longer takes, moody atmosphere, a visual palette that's closer to a painting created by a disturbed mind (the mind of the protagonist), and a filmic style you can compare to David Lynch's Twin Peaks or Sam Raimi's A Simple Plan.

Bielinsky's influences were, mainly, the American films from the seventies: The Godfather, Deliverance, The French Connection, The Sting. And directors like William Friedkin, John Boorman, Martin Scorsese, Brian De Palma. He also loved the music from those films. I remember once inviting him to a radio program and asking him to bring his favorite music. He brought the famous Dueling Banjos from Deliverance, a movie, he said, that was a big influence in the making of El aura; and a piece of music that can be too easily interpreted as a metaphor for his life and films.

In the last long and formal interview we had, a few weeks before the opening of El aura, I brought up the subject of the Jewish influence in his work. In a way, I thought, you can think about the difficulties of his main characters to get a hold of what is really going on around them, and compare them to the point of view of the 'distant observer', that kind of analytical approach that comes with the fact of being a Jewish person in a non-jewish environment. He said he never thought about it that way, but he accepted it as a possibility.

And that was one of the greatest things about Fabián. Unlike most of his peers — even when he was more talented than 90% of them —, he was open to hearing comments and criticism about his work, to share opinions about his movies and stylistic choices, and to discuss films in general with great passion and knowledge.

As a secondary fact, his death meant the Argentine film community lost not only a great filmmaker, but the one man who could reconcile the two apparently antagonistic forces in the local film industry: the purely commercial and mostly mediocre films that are big money-makers, with the independent ones, which are recognized worldwide for their qualities but are mostly ignored by the large audiences in Argentina. With Nine Queens, Fabián pleased critics and audiences alike. With El aura, the critics' response was stronger than the public's, and the movie made half the box-office of Nine Queens, a fact that was hard for Fabián to take, especially because it wasn't a cheap film to make. But, without a doubt, it's the best, more complex film of the two.

Talkative and shy, with flashes of light and dark, easygoing and aloof, Bielinsky was, along with Lucrecia Martel (another filmmaker with similar quirks), the Argentine filmmaker who better understood the complexities and ambiguities of cinema as a medium. As film lovers, knowing that we will only have these two films, these two masterpieces to cherish for the rest of our lives, makes his death even more painful. Knowing he won't be around to talk about them, to share his comments about the last movie he watched or the story he was working on, makes it even sadder. And knowing the beautiful family who survives him makes difficult to stomach the elusive, mysterious, yet ultimately very real fact that he's gone.

The whole thing was a long, big, 'aura', Fabián. It was beautiful while it lasted. And we thank you for sharing it with us.

Diego Lerer
© FIPRESCI, 2006

Diego Lerer is editor and film critic for the Argentinean newspaper "Clarín".

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