![]() Maybe the police and soldiers and some of the rabble are on your side, for now. It will eat you, with only the bankers figuring out a way to profit from the violence that comes from extreme wealth disparity and government by kleptocracy. ![]() There are other “commercial” bankers working over this client list, promising investments in currency speculation, which might keep pace with the ruinous inflation - something the rich all over the world fear more than death or dictatorships, their accumulated wealth losing most of its value.ĭe Wiel has to suffer business and social slights and boorish lawyers ( Juan Pablo Geretto), the threat of losing clients to better (currency speculating) offers or to government “interest.” Can he adapt, on the fly, to maintain his business and preserve his own inherited wealth?įontana’s film is a cautionary tale an overt red-alert warning. Some of the very wealthy - and that’s the only world De Wiel travels in - including the Monsignor (the person to refer to the victims of the regime as “parasites”), have an idea of what happened to Keys. They hear an array of opinions about the man, good and loyal to manipulative and crude. He and his wife are there because his bank’s partner, Keys, who ran things in country, might be laying low in Argentina or even Switzerland, or “disappeared.” The title is a bit of Swiss (French, Italian and German speakers) banker slang for “ask no questions.” And the story, as its opening chapter reveals, is “The Camel Tour,” a “private” banker coming to the clients, far and wide, trying to help them navigate the shifting political sands and hyper-inflation that dog the country. ![]() And now it’s eating them, too.įontana’s covering some of the same ground as the Argentine classic “The Official Story” and “The Disappeared.” But he uses a seriously unsympathetic outsider as his and our tour guide, letting one of those famously discrete and infamously amoral Swiss bankers see a nightmare that their clients help bring on by hiding their assets, dodging taxes and backing governments that let them get away with it. The oligarchs got their way, a government of their choosing. “Did you hear about Perez? They went to his house and took everything from him!” “They ‘disappear’ horses, too.”Īnd in the small talk of “Do you know Gstaad?” and “You are more than welcome to stay with us when you visit,” Yvan and Ines hear snippets of the unthinkable. “These days, they don’t have enough with people,” still another gripes. Another takes them horseback riding, but there is no joy in the outing. “The military is getting restless,” one client sighs (in Spanish, with English subtitles). He can tell his wife, confidante and traveling companion Ines ( Stéphanie Cléau) “It’s like being in Europe,” but there are soldiers on the streets, stopping anybody young, anybody at all.Īnd for the rich, who along with the higher-ups in the Argentine Catholic Church who might have backed that coup, the drunken revel in “owning the left” is past. ( Fabrizio Rongione) is told “You don’t understand, this country was a mess” and that the coup brought “much needed reforms” and that “a purification phase” was in order to deal with “parasites,” he’s seeing resignation in the faces and fear in the voices of the well-heeled. “Azor” is set a few years after Argentina’s 1976 military coup, the time of “los desaparecidos,” “the disappeared,” when a military dictatorship made tens of thousands of Argentine activists, political rivals and other “undesirables” disappear - one of recent history’s most infamous state-sponsored mass murder programs.Īnd as many times as our protagonist, the visiting Swiss banker Yvan De Wiel But they’re a glum lot, filled with resignation or dread. It’s set among his country’s uber-rich, their grand, inherited estates and stables, their horse racing outings, Michelin star dinners and galas. A quiet chill clings to “Azor,” the debut feature of Argentine filmmaker Andreas Fontana.
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