The psycho who tried to get away with murder
Tesis sobre un homicidio plays thrilling game of opposites
NOIR. A good film noir is supposed to rely heavily on such visual and aural elements as a menacing urban setting, German Expressionism-style chiaroscuro, a chain-smoking PI, an elusive damsel in distress with an obscure past, an unsettling music score punctuating the action, the amplified hiss of a cigarette being lit, the sound of a shot of JB being poured in a glass.
It’s not that these elements alone suffice to make a piece of good hard boiled narrative, it’s just that you cannot do without them, the only concession being, perhaps, that the order of the elements may be altered at will — though not at random.
The presence of a darkly impenetrable character with a pathological obsession adds another dimension to the noirish blend, imbuing the setting and the storyline with an alluring game of opposites — a psycho killer pitted against a self-styled PI in search of some form of expiation for the assassin’s own capital sins and the hunter’s unexpressed but evident pending accounts.
THESIS. An M.A. thesis is not just about a careful, attentive review of the existing literature about a topic that needs elucidating — it ought to pose relevant questions and provide answers with a solid grounding on field work and research methodology. As a discipline built on a body of codes and regulations aimed at having justice served, Law can purportedly be manipulated to, instead, serve an individual’s or a group’s vested interests, to mask their true intentions.
This is not true of Gonzalo Ruiz Cordera (Alberto Ammann, suitably inscrutable), a young law graduate who sets up a diabolical scheme to prove his conjectures about the existing gaps in the Penal Code. Ruiz Cordera is a fictitious character from Diego Paszkowski’s prize-winning novel Tesis sobre un homicidio (1999), but his ruminations are as true and pertinent as the loopholes in criminal legislation that allow, in many cases, proven criminals and wrongdoers to escape punishment.The contradictions and maladjustments between law and justice are at the core of Tesis para un homicidio, the novel, and they are also the crux of the problem the internationally renowned Law Professor Roberto Bermúdez (Ricardo Darín, malleable and brilliant as expected) is confronted with in the film adaptation when Gonzalo, a student of his yearly postgraduate seminar, underscores the professor’s openly cynical if true-to-life position that the Law cannot be equated with Justice and Truth. Speaking of which, the professor’s and the student’s position may not be as far removed, the only difference being that the former knows his hands are tied and the latter thinks he can, through the sheer power of intellect, get away with murder, literally.
