I often see films that I don’t really think about again after I’ve turned off the television or left the theatre.
Not so with “The Secret in Their Eyes” (“El Secreto de sus Ojos”). Just as the film itself was centered around a man haunted by a cold case from so many years ago, so too has this film haunted me in various ways.
The story centers around an investigator within the Argentinean justice system. They have a somewhat different approach to law than we do–there, from what I understand, it is the judges and their offices, which consist of lawyers, police investigators and so on, who look into the facts of the case and make a determination about who committed the crime.
The investigator is returning to his home town after many years stationed in a remote region of the country. He has just retired. He comes to visit the lawyer he used to work with many years earlier–a beautiful, brilliant woman with an ivy-league law degree and a privileged upbringing, and tells her that he has plans to write a novel about the “case that got away” because it has always haunted him. She knows the one he means–the one neither of them have forgotten through the years. The one that changed the course of their lives. Continue reading
