It is the social and moral point of view of director Santiago Mitre’s award-winning film La patota what turns the protagonist, a victim of rape, into someone who goes beyond commonly established notions of crime and justice. In spite of having suffered an enormous degree of violence, Mitre’s strong heroine believes that said violence should not be used as a response to crime.
Paulina (Dolores Fonzi) is a socially aware young lawyer with a flourishing practice and an even more promising law career. Her father, Fernando (Oscar Martínez) is a renowned judge who cares deeply for her and wants her to have a highly-rank position in the law profession.
It would seem that father and daughter had always agreed on how she was to develop her career, but now an unexpected change of plans has taken place.
Paulina wants to quit both the Ph.D. she’s pursuing and her practice in order to become a rural school teacher in the outskirts of Posadas, the city where she was born, near the Paraguay-Brazil border in the province of Misiones.
To her, teaching destitute students would mean making a true commitment in a manner she finds more tangible and down to earth. However, her father finds it to be a rather naive hippie-like fantasy and tries to convince her through any means not to do so.
Even so, Paulina’s strong wilfulness and self-assurance prevail. So she travels to Posadas to take up the position as rural teacher and starts with her lessons on citizenship issues and politics right away — despite her students’ hostility and apathy.
But she won’t give up easily. Eventually, she befriends a colleague, Laura (Laura López Moyano) with whom she spends time after work. One night, after meeting Laura, Paulina returns home on a motorbike and, all of a sudden, she’s ambushed and attacked by a gang of five youths. And one of them rapes her.
From then on, La patota unfolds in an unsettling and daring manner that will surely prove very thought-provoking to viewers. For starters, Paulina turns into the exact opposite of the usual victim of an assault, because not long after the rape, she resolutely goes back to work — although her father and an old boyfriend don’t want her to — and ultimately starts to realize that her attackers, whom she actually didn’t see that clearly, might actually be students in her class — except for the one who actually raped her.
Furthermore, she also decides not to identify them once the police have arrested them thanks to her father’s somewhat unlawful intervention.
As is well known, Santiago Mitre’s La patota is a remake of the 1960 Argentine classic of the same name, directed by Daniel Tinayre and starring local diva Mirtha Legrand. And while a number of elements have been changed, you could say that this new version has preserved quite a bit of the essence of the original.
More to the point, Mitre’s film set tongues wagging during its presentation at the Cannes Film Festival earlier this year, where it snatched the top prize of the Critics Week sidebar and a FIPRESCI award for the parallel sections.
The lead character in Mitre’s remake, now embodied in a riveting performance by Dolores Fonzi, comes across as a very singular person that would rather seek the truth — meaning perhaps why she was raped — and deal with the attack in a way that is perplexing to those around her. She’s not to hand them to forces of law and order. As she puts it: “When the poor are involved, justice would rather look for the guilty parties than for the truth”, to which she adds: “What happened to me is the result of a world that creates nothing but violence.” And it’s not that she’s a liberal bleeding heart, for her convictions come out of a far more profound place.
Following Paulina’s line of thought, just because the attackers are poor and outcasts, they have almost no chance of getting a fair trial — in fact, when she’s asked to identify them, it is plainly clear they had already been beaten up by the police.
And this is when La patota is to be understood more in allegorical terms than literal ones. As is the case with Les fils, by the Dardenne brothers — which, according to Mitre, is one of the films he took as a reference to approach Paulina’s ordeal — La patota doesn’t ask viewers to empathize or necessarily understand the reasons why she does what she does.
In allegorical terms, their decisions can be representative of a human understanding of conflicts that are rooted in far more complex stances where politics, social injustice, a biased legal system and brutality mingle to ill-fated effect. It’s not about forgiveness and redemption either — as the original version was. That would’ve been too easy to digest.
In fact, some of Paulina’s thoughts and beliefs are clearly enunciated, but most of what goes on inside her remains inscrutable. That’s why La patota is the type of film that doesn’t give any answers, but instead poses questions that are hard to answer — and I mean that in a good way.
Like Mitre’s previous films, El estudiante and Los posibles, his new outing is extremely well shot in all regards, from cinematography to sound design, from the mise-en-scene to the editing. And the narrative structure that goes back and forth in time as it alternates points of view is an achievement that surely adds to the overall intrigue of one compelling feature.
Production notes
La patota / Paulina (Argentina, 2015). Directed by Santiago Mitre. Written by Santiago Mitre, Mariano Llinás, based on the film La Patota, written by Eduardo Borras, directed by Daniel Tinayre. With Dolores Fonzi, Cristian Salguero, Esteban Lamothe, Oscar Martínez, Verónica Llinás, Laura Lopez Moyano. Cinematography: Gustavo Biazzi. Editing: Delfina Castagnino, Leandro Aste, Joana Collier. Running time: 103 minutes.
