Wild Tales (2014) is an omnibus feature-film directed by the Argentine TV and movie-maker, Damien Szifron. Szifron, who is presently 41, is well-known in Argentina for his work directing TV series including the highly successful Los Simuladores (2001-2003) -- a show about a group of grifters who use their criminal skills to extricate ordinary people from commonly experiences irritations and nuisances in life (overly nosy neighbors, too importunate lovers, etc.) Clearly, Szifron's work in TV has trained him in the art of punchy, efficient narrative-- particularly in short formats. Wild Tales seems an extension of Los Simuladores -- the movie is comprised of six episodes, each featuring some kind of revenge. (Aristotle called revenge "wild justice" and this concept motivates the vignettes that we see.) Some of the film is exceedingly funny and the entire picture has an unpredictable, scary edge -- it's story-telling at its purest with tales that seem variants on stories that date back to Chaucer and Boccaccio at least. The movie is shot in bright clear color, edited for clarity, and with actors who playing one-dimensional, cartoonish roles and it's all exceedingly entertaining.
In the opening episode, a group of travelers find themselves on a plane. After the plane has taken-off, the passengers find that they all have something in common -- they have all wronged a certain man, the man who seems to be flying the airplane. This is very funny and scary. The second vignette involves a gangster who makes the mistake of stopping at a lonely café where one of his victims works as a waitress. It's called "Rat Poison." The third episode is probably the strongest -- it's a variant on Spielberg's old made-for-TV movie Duel, a study of comically exaggerated road-rage on an empty stretch of desert and mountain highway. We see a well-to-do man tooling around in an expensive car on a remote stretch of highway -- the man insults a peasant driving an old, ratty-looking sedan. The opening shots are all cut to a soundtrack that rips-off the Eagles' Hotel California and the gliding tracking shots impart to the images a sense of menace. When the wealthy guy's car has a flat tire, he has to pull over next to a little bridge over a river flowing down from the barren Andes. Of course, the burly and aggrieved peasant shows-up and all sorts of ultra-violent mayhem, staged like a Laurel and Hardy two-reeler, as increasingly brutal tit-for-tat ensues. At one point, the two men are trapped in a car dangling down from a dirt cliff each pounding at the other's face with fists or tire-irons -- the two assailants are so cramped together that they can't really swing their weapons effectively and so they can merely bruise one another: it's a brilliant image of the futility of revenge and, perhaps, the futility of violence itself. Wild Tales slackens a little in its second half, but it's still entertaining. The fourth episode involves an unjustly towed automobile; unfortunately, for everyone involved, the victim of this bureaucratic SNAFU is a specialist in demolition using high-explosives. The fifth story is about a hit-and-run accident. A rich man tries to exculpate his son from responsibility by persuading a servant to take the blame for the crime. (This story reprises the plot line of Nuri Bilge Ceylan's film Three Monkeys). Everyone is corrupt and tries to bilk the rich man with the result that he reneges on the deal. (This episode seems only remotely connected the film's general theme and is, probably, the weakest of the six stories.) The last story involves a wedding that goes seriously awry when the bride realizes her husband has invited another woman with whom he has been sleeping. Wild Tales is shallow and doesn't exactly live up to the promise shown by its first half, but its wonderfully entertaining and effectively made. (Damien Szifron has been lured to Hollywood where he seems to be slated to direct a remake of the old TV show starring Lee Majors, The Six-Million Dollar Man -- a project well-suited to this director's pop sensibility. Adjusted for inflation, the cyborg hero is now called The Six Billion Dollar Man.)
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