Azor (Andreas Fontana, 2021) (Patreon)

One of 2021's standout debut films, Azor is a meticulous and frustrating experience. Loosely patterned on Heart of Darkness -- even ending with a literal trek into the jungle and discovering the hidden nexus of political power -- Azor is a film that asks us to observe the fastidious naivety of its protagonist while affording its viewers the benefit of hindsight. It's not that Swiss private banker Yvan De Weil (Fabrizio Rongione) has no idea that a military junta has taken power in Argentina. Everyone concerned is well aware. The problem is that he does not comprehend the extent of the junta's violence, or the degree to which the private wealth it's his job to manage serves as the fuel for the military's operations.

Yvan is characterized as the less charismatic, more reserved partner of a man named Keys, a well-liked but reckless banker whose connections with Argentina's highest right-wing echelons led to his mysterious disappearance. In terms both literal and figurative, Yvan is chasing a ghost, trying to consolidate Keys' accounts for the bank and attempting to grasp what is going on in this country. Azor relies on the viewer's basic understanding that official Swiss neutrality has long been a cover for massive financial malfeasance, and this only becomes more explicit as the film plods to its conclusion.

Although there's nothing particularly wrong with Azor, it definitely feels like one of those films whose makers have a particular thesis and intend to illustrate it with minimal fuss. Although the overall tone -- lux interiors, country houses, powerful men whispering in the ears of their attachés -- strongly recalls Claude Chabrol, but Fontana doesn't quite have the master's chops. Framing, editing, and rhythm are all a bit perfunctory here, as if an overly developed style would detract from the conceptual agenda Azor means to unfurl. In this regard, I was a bit surprised at first to learn that Fontana collaborated on the script with Mariano Llinás, but then I took a beat and thought about it. La Flor, with its undeniable strengths, is a literary film if ever there was one. Visual and auditory articulation are secondary to the larger shape of the thing, and that's certainly the case with Azor as well.

Still, understood on that level, Azor is an intelligent, reasonably satisfying piece of work. As we follow Yvan and his chilly wife Inés (Stephanie Cléau) through various rendezvous with Argentina's elite, we are shown that the fascist takeover required a number of moving parts. The clergy, in the daunting form of Monsignor Tatoski (Pablo Torre Nilson) is brutally frank about the coup's role in purging the nation of undesirables. "Parasites must be eradicated, even in the best of families," he declares, obliquely referring to a well-connected investor (Juan Trench) whose own daughter has been disappeared. This is intriguing, in part because it suggests a degree of disavowal on the part of certain responsible parties, reminding us that not all fascists relish human destruction, but simply see it as an inevitable sacrifice.

Still, overall Azor foregrounds Yvan's ostensible "political education," and in so doing places us at several removes from his compromised morality. We are being asked to simply judge; we are never once implicated ourselves. This approach may be intentional, suggesting that political violence is actually quite simple and unexceptional. I may disagree with that sentiment, but the more frustrating thing is that Azor doesn't seem able to define its terms. For a film about hushed corridors and coded language -- the title itself is Swiss slang meaning "don't discuss it" -- Azor is fairly unambiguous.