Hermógenes (Joaquín Furriel) is an illiterate, modest and submissive worker from the province of Santiago del Estero who comes to Buenos Aires with his wife, Gladys (Mónica Lairana), to find a job and maybe even prosper and grow. He’s soon hired by Latuada (Luis Ziembrowski), a portentous and bullying con man, to work at one of his many butcher shops.
Though wary of Latuada’s irate temper, Hermógenes feels thankful for getting a job and becomes an efficient butcher in no time. He learns the customers’ first names, greets them with a smile, flatters the women, gives them the best cuts.
However, he never expected to be supposed to sell almost decomposed meat, bought for little money and a sure cause of food poisoning. This way, different customers get different meat, but they all pay the same high price. For the business owner, it’s a win-win situation. Not so for his employees, who are exploited, psychologically abused and deceived by Latuada. With no education and no means, Hermógenes has nowhere to go, and so he keeps on working at the butcher shop. But things get worse and worse, and since a man can only take so much humiliation, murder is sometimes thought of as the only way out.
El patrón, radiografía de un crimen, is the first fiction film by documentary filmmaker Sebastián Schindel (Mundo Alas, Rerum Novarum and El Rascacielos Latino), and is based on the book of the same title by Elías Neuman about a real-life case in Buenos Aires some thirty years back. Like the book, the movie doesn’t only tell the story about the worker turned murderer: it also exposes the tainted underworld of butcher shops, which often disguise bad meat through different illegal procedures.
Well narrated, switching back and forth between past and present, Schindel’s film is not concerned with building suspense, but instead it focuses on the degradation process suffered by a worker at the hands of his employer in this story of modern slavery. In this regard, you could say it’s a fairly compelling character study as well as a portrayal of a very dark side of today’s Argentina, carefully hidden behind a smoke screen. Thanks to Schindel’s expertise as a documentary maker, this fiction film is detailed and truly realistic.
Joaquín Furriel’s performance as Hermógenes is an unexpected surprise. Furriel is cast against type and really transforms into a worker from the provinces, from his looks to his personality. In fact, much of the film’s relative success has to do with Furriel’s work.
Luis Ziembrowski also stands out as the mean butcher, even if he’s played this type of roles many times before.
The remaining thespians, including Guillermo Pfening as Hermógenes’ lawyer, are in tune with the overall mood of the film.
On the minus side, the dramatization of the end is not very compelling. Until a few scenes before, the narrative soars and maintains a sinister, menacing tone, but then it loses momentum, becomes formulaic and unnecessarily celebratory. It’s as though the ending belonged to a different film, a less nuanced one. Not because of what happens, but because of how it happens.
Because the story sometimes delves into repetitive material, and the subplot about the legal system is underdeveloped, Patrón, radiografía de un crimen, misses on some great opportunities. But when it does work, which is more frequently, it’s good dramatic entertainment.
