El Presidente – La Cordillera (2017)

Directed by: Santiago Miter | 114 minutes | drama | Actors: Ricardo Darín, Walter Andrade, Dolores Fonzi, José María Marcos, Fernando Contigiani García, Erica Rivas, Ariel Chavarría, Christian Slater, Maria Ahuad, Paulina García, Marcos Horrisberger, Daniel Giménez Cacho, Esteban Bigliardi, Gerardo Romano, Mario Bodega, Alfredo Castro, Luis Herrera

The exciting film ‘El Presidente’, selected at Cannes for the Un Certain Regard program, is the third feature film by Argentine director Santiago Miter. In the film, a political summit sets the stage for a brooding thriller starring an impenetrable Argentine president whose political baptism of fire coincides with a personal crisis. What happens in the inhospitable heights of the Andes, the daylight often cannot bear.

‘Do you believe in good and evil?’, Spanish journalist Claudia Klein (Elena Anaya) asks President Hernán Blanco (Ricardo Darín). She interviews the various heads of state present at the Latin American summit. ‘How can I, as president of Argentina, not believe in the distinction between the two?, Blanco ripostes. Without the existence of those two, a president can never serve his country, is his thought. Moments later, he mysteriously adds that “evil exists and one does not become president without looking evil in the eye at least a few times.” In this short interview (the conversation is abruptly interrupted) lies the core of the film ‘El Presidente’. It is the moral black-and-white thinking that director Miter tries to disprove throughout the film. Ambiguity, double agendas, hidden pasts and unanswered questions of guilt form the core of his story.

Hernán Blanco, president of Argentina only six months ago, travels to an important political summit in the mountain resort of La Cordillera, high in the Chilean Andes. There, several Latin American heads of state meet with the aim of forming a (fictional) Latin American oil alliance. Brazil, with the continent’s most powerful president (called ‘the Emperor’), is firmly in control, while Mexico wants to put a stop to the plans. Meanwhile, the (uninvited) United States is trying to get a finger in the pie through backroom politics. Intrigue abounds, and as if that weren’t enough, Blanco’s unstable daughter Marina (Dolores Fonzi) also arrives in the midst of a personal crisis. Her ex-husband threatens to blackmail the president with information about fraudulent transactions from years ago.

The political thriller until then steadily works towards a tense climax until more than halfway through. But when Hernán brings Marina over because he doesn’t think she can be alone, the mood changes. ‘El Presidente’ turns into a mysterious psychological drama that explores the depths of the minds of both Marina and her father. The search for the truth; to good and evil, from that moment begins the political intrigue in which Blanco is further suffocated, and to control his personal history.

Blanco is initially presented as a man with a ‘clean’ past (what’s in a name?). A blank slate whose career took place in the rural province of La Pampa, as mayor of the provincial capital of Santa Rosa. It is no coincidence that director Miter places Blanco’s background precisely there, because such rural areas in Argentina are regularly associated with the country’s violent past. After all, wasn’t the countryside idealized by the military regime, as it were Argentina? More recent examples, of dozens of murders of women (often by partners, exes or family), also showed that justice does not always prevail in the pampas.

With Ricardo Darín (‘El secreto de sus ojos’), Elena Anaya (‘La piel que habito’, ‘Lucía y el sexo’), Erica Rivas (the bride from ‘Relatos salvajes’), the indefinable Alfredo Castro as a psychiatrist and Hypnotherapist who comes to treat Marina, and Paulina Garcia (‘Gloria’, ‘La novia del desierto’) as the endearing Chilean president, Miter has recruited a near-perfect star cast of Spanish-speaking actors.

The good-versus-evil layer of meaning floats higher and higher, but Miter does not provide answers, neither morally nor narratively. Who is good and who is bad, what Blanco’s past really looked like: we will never know. That keeps it exciting until the end, but also feels a bit unfinished in the end. As if part 2 is yet to come. If that’s actually the case, it certainly wouldn’t be a punishment.