Photo courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics
Rated R
Directed by Damián Szifron
3.5/4 Stars
The young model, hoping to be left alone with her magazine and her view from the airliner’s window, is hesitant in the cross-aisle conversation started by a flirtatious older man, a classical music critic. She perks up when they discover a name in common, Gabriel Pasternak. Gabriel was a difficult ex-boyfriend whose grant proposal had been rejected on the critic’s recommendation. Overhearing the discussion, a retired schoolteacher recalls Gabriel as a troubled child—and then his ex-boss recounts firing the young man, and then… Everyone in the cabin had known and rejected Gabriel, who gathered them onto this flight, hijacked the plane and was bearing down on the home of his parents, the Freudian source of his malformed personality.
So begins the Oscar-nominated Wild Tales, an anthology of six short films by Argentine director Damián Szifron. The episode called “Pasternak” is reminiscent of one of Rod Serling’s compact explorations into the bizarre, a psychological short story worthy of “Twilight Zone” or “Night Gallery.” Much of Wild Tales is like the best of the old TV dramas, intensely focused and without a second to waste—the opposite of today’s lazily edited indie films or overstuffed Hollywood productions.
If “Pasternak” is a little like Serling, “The Strongest” brings to mind Steven Spielberg’s 1971 road-rage TV movie, The Duel. Trouble begins when Diego, a professional in an expensive power car, is slowed on a desolate country road by a slow-moving rust bucket whose driver deliberately swerves to prevent him from passing. Diego seems to win the class war when he finally zooms around him and shows the finger to the slow driver, who looks like something out of a Telemundo version of “Duck Dynasty.” A few miles down the line, Diego has a flat tire and confrontation with the redneck motorist is inevitable.
Revenge is the theme linking Wild Tales’ short films, sometimes as self-destructive madness, occasionally with more ambiguous endings. Moral choices are at the heart of these stories. In “The Rats,” a young waitress is forced to serve an abusive gangster-cum-politician whose machinations had led to her father’s suicide. Her older co-worker, a woman who served time in prison, suggests spiking the customer’s meal with rat poison. The camera keeps showing the canister as an object of temptation. In “The Proposal,” a rich man hires his gardener to confess to the hit-and-run death committed by his son—and then must haggle with all parties (including his lawyer and the prosecutor) over the cost of perverting justice.
Dark humor leavens several of these stories and prevents Wild Tales from becoming an anthology of the grim. In the opening credits, the equation of wild animals with actors’ names suggests an idea implicit in most of Wild Tales: the beastly DNA of humanity that remains at the root of our worst behavior.
