White Elephant (Elefante blanco)

Dir: Pablo Trapero

2012

****

Argentinean director Pablo Trapero’s 2012 drama White Elephant, co-written by Trapero, Alejandro Fadel, Martín Mauregui and Santiago Mitre, is a dark and seemingly hopeless film highlighting the disparity between the rich and the poor and the hypocrisy that comes with it. The story takes place in the slums of Buenos Aires that surround an old hospital building, named the ‘white elephant’ by the locals due to it’s size and colour and because it was built for the people but soon abandoned. It now houses the poverty stricken, gangs and drug users of the favelas, like a cathedral of poverty. We follow its inhabitants through the eyes of two priests. The film opens in the Peruvian jungle where Father Nicolás (Jérémie Renier) witnesses the brutal massacre of his friends and congregation while he alone survives, leaving a profound sense of guilt for not having also died in the catastrophe and not being able to stop it in any way. Father Nicolás's beloved friend and confessor Father Julián (Ricardo Darín) brings Nicolás to the Villa Virgin, a favela like shantytown in the slums of Buenos Aires near an abandoned hospital project known as the White Elephant. Drugs provide the major business in this ghetto and unsurprisingly violence comes with it. Shoot-outs are a regular occurrence and the majority of the residence live in fear. It’s hell on earth. The two priests work tirelessly to help the local people and father Julián uses his political connections to oversee the construction of a new hospital. Nicolás remains deeply troubled from his experience in the jungle, and as his faith weakens he embarks on a sexual relationship with Luciana (Martina Gusman), a young, attractive, atheist social worker. Meanwhile, tension and violence between the slum drug dealing cartels grows, and when work on the hospital is halted by ministerial decree, the faith of the inhabitants of Villa Virgin is tested, and father Nicolás discovers he has been called by father Julián to assume his role of parish priest as Julián is coping with an undiagnosed neurological disease that is terminal. Both men are looked at to help the people and both men are tested, both physically and in faith. The film is a complex look at the test of wills. The performances from the three leading actors, Darin, Renier, and Gusman are superb, I especially believed that Ricardo Darín was a real priest, and the cinematography by Guillermo Nieto is striking and sublime, making even the decrepit of slums look somehow beautiful. The score by Michael Nyman is also brilliant and enhances the film tremendously but the big problem with the film is the melodrama. The action sequences are also a little off at times and perhaps should have been shortened. The real strength is in the idea and the two dominant symbols in the film that represent its major themes - the unfinished hospital that is the white elephant of the title and the murder of priests. The unfinished white building, that was supposed to be a hospital which carried the ambitions of various Argentinian leaders to be the best hospital on the continent, has become the centre of a Buenos Aires slum. On public land outside, building has begun on a project to provide new permanent homes for the slum dwellers, a community centre and a new church at its centre. This building is soon abandoned by the development company after its employees' wages fail to materialise. Who is responsible for paying the wages is not established amidst the bureaucracy. The community's anger when the work ceases boils over into a violent confrontation with the police that ends in fatality. The expression white elephant suggests the evident presence of something ignored or not spoken about. It is a symbol prevalent throughout the film, both in story and in the characters. Other white elephants include the wealth of the Catholic church in contrast with its parishioners. The question of why a priest, as a representative of faith, cannot marry or have sexual relations yet can preach on these matters is also glaring. The criminality of the authorities is also as bad as the crime committed in the slums and perhaps the biggest white elephant of them all is why the elected leaders don’t act on any of it? I think the main theme is a little over complicated by too much happening at once – and the ending is questionable – but at its core the story is effective, emotional and hard-hitting.