Movie Review: Wild Tales directed by Damian Szifron

I am watching at least a movie every week, many of them are good to very good, but I rarely can say about a film that it reflects fully the dynamism and intensity of life. That kind of organic outburst of energy going beyond any comprehensible and acceptable behavior.

Wild Tales (Relatos Salvajes) a multi-awarded movie by the young Argentinian film director Damian Szifron is made of six stand alone short visual stories. The characters are unable to control their emotions and vengeance is what make them ignore any social conventions. Many of them are the victim of their own greadiness for violence. 

Although the emotions uniting the disparate episodes are the same, their framing and representations as as diverse as the diversity of human nature in general. There are the two alpha men on the highway crossing a heartbreaking landscape ending up carbonized in an embrace that the police officers took as an illicit love affair; the betrayed bride at the middle class wedding that swears to make her groom pay with the life of it, not before storming around everyone, particularly the women her man slept with; the loan shark who destroyed a beautiful family who ends up in a pool of blood killed by the cook who thought that returning to prison is much safer than surviving every day in freedom; or the people mysteriously gathered in a plane drove by Pasternak who got out of his mind completely and crash it in his parents´ house. 

The violence is framed in a very ironic way. Laughing will make one forget the outrageous fight which is just about to happen and which does not seem to end up either too soon or well. The brevity of the six stories told in about two hours is a good example of visual narrative. The power of the image, built of different emotional sequences, make the story relatable and at a very great extent memorable. 

The intense horror of everyday life, in a way. But the sequences do have so much vital energy that we ignore in real life and it is very much in the chore of human life but obliterated by civilized behavior and politeness. Nevertheless it is there and Relatos Salvajes - which I watched on MUBI - says the human truth bluntly. 

Honestly, what would it happen if we will do what we are often thinking to do - especially against those people who bother us in a way or another? Homo hominis lupus, that´s it...

Rating: 5 stars