The opening sequence of Wild Tales sets up a Twilight Zone-style series of revelations, compressed into just a few minutes. Passengers riding on a suspiciously underfilled plane begin to realize that there might be a reason for their presence there, beyond the obvious business of getting to a destination. Writer/director Damian Szifron wants to get his movie started with a bang, and he does—in fact, the rest of this anthology feature doesn’t live up to the wicked curtain-raiser. But there are enough moments of irony and ingenuity to explain why the Oscar voters made this Argentine entry one of the five nominees in the Foreign Language Film category (it lost to Ida).
Along with the airplane opening, modes of transportation figure prominently in the stories. In one, a lone driver (Leonardo Sbaraglia) has a flat tire in the middle of nowhere, which allows the slowpoke he antagonized earlier to stop by and exact revenge. In another, an explosives expert (Ricardo Darin, the star of The Secret in Their Eyes) becomes enraged by a parking ticket—rage that leads him to lose everything. But there’s a twist. A lot of these segments rely on a twist, a technique that doesn’t quite disguise how in-your-face the lessons are. The twists also can’t disguise the way some of the tales rely on illogical behavior to allow their plots to develop.
The long final episode suggests that the illogical behavior can be chalked up to a strain of magical realism. Here a wedding reception goes on far longer than it would in the real world, when the bride (Erica Rivas) melts down after learning something rotten about her groom during the party. The story goes off the rails, but also hits a crazed pitch that results in some unpredictable highs. Szifron’s targets are macho culture and the lizard-brain need for revenge, although mostly he’s into savoring the sardonic juice he can squeeze from his greedy characters. Sometimes that means sitting through 20 minutes of buildup just to get to a single amusing plot reversal, as in a segment about wealthy folks trying to cover up a family crime by buying off the people around them. Wild Tales is a showy exercise (you can see why Pedro Almodovar signed on as a producer), and Szifron has undoubtedly punched his ticket for bigger and better things. He’ll have to deliver something more than a scattering of gotchas next time.
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WILD TALES Opens Fri., March 13 at Seven Gables. Rated R. 122 minutes.
