Wild Tales · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

Two cars on a highway in Patagonia. One overtakes the other, a petty slight passes through the glass, and that should be the end of it — the kind of thing you'd have forgotten by the next gas station. The road is enormous, the horizon dead level, the light hard and clean. Javier Juliá's camera holds the geography so precisely that you always know who is where and moving how fast. Then neither man drives on.

What happens next in 'El más fuerte' is the whole film in miniature. Six times Szifron builds a completely ordinary world, and six times something comes up through the floor of it. The pleasure is real and slightly shameful. What's harder to say is what we're watching, because it isn't quite drama and it isn't quite satire. Deleuze has a name for it.

In the middle of Cinema 1 he puts a category between feeling and doing and calls it the impulse-image. An action-image runs on a circuit: you see a situation, you act, the situation changes. An impulse-image doesn't work that way. A drive takes hold and eats its way through a world, and the act it produces is out of all proportion to whatever set it off. Deleuze found this in Stroheim, Buñuel, Losey, and traced it back to Zola's naturalism, which kept insisting that a Paris apartment house was a jungle with wallpaper. Szifron's Spanish title says it without the wallpaper: relatos salvajes.

Naturalism in this sense needs two layers. There's the derived milieu, the ordinary determined place: a plane cabin, a roadhouse, a stretch of highway, a municipal impound office, a wealthy family's home, a banquet hall. And there's the originary world, which isn't somewhere else but the same place seen as a field of raw appetite. The craft decision that makes this legible is counterintuitive, and it's the best thing in the film. Juliá shoots chaos with the composure of a thriller — clean wide framings, strong horizons, bright high-contrast color, camera movement withheld until it's needed. Each frame is a closed set treated as a system, a pressure vessel. It has to be. An eruption only reads as an eruption if the surface it comes through looks sound.

The highway is the clearest originary world in the film because Szifron strips it of everything social. No witnesses, no institution to appeal to, nobody to be embarrassed in front of. Two men in the emptiness, and the segment title tells you what's left over: The Strongest. Sbaraglia and his opposite number chart an entirely plausible descent from irritation to atavism, and that shape has a name. Deleuze calls it the line of slope. Naturalism runs downhill toward exhaustion or death and it does not run back up. Every tale here is a slope, and the film is honest that its releases are irreversible.

Then the objects. Szifron plants a prop early and detonates it late: a screwdriver, a car, a wedding cake. As screenwriting that's just Chekhov's gun, and he's very good at it. Read through Deleuze it gets stranger. The fetish, in the impulse-image, is a fragment torn out of the originary world and left lying around in the ordinary one, a piece of the savage sitting on a table. The gun on the wall isn't a promise about the plot. It's the wild, already in the room.

Szifron's own invention is a matter of rhythm. He edits violence with the timing of a joke. Establish the ordinary, hold it, hold it, then accelerate at exactly the frame where a comic escalation would pay off — except what arrives isn't a punchline. Eisenstein had a word for the moment accumulated pressure stops being quantity and becomes a change in kind: the pathetic, water going to ice going to steam. Szifron's cutting is engineered for that leap, and by running it on a comedian's clock he gets an audience to laugh a half-second before it understands what it's laughing at.

This is where the lens really opens the film. Deleuze's account of postwar cinema turns on a break: characters stop being able to respond adequately to what they see, the circuit from perception to action goes slack, and cinema answers by inventing the seer, someone who looks and endures because nothing they could do would help. Ricardo Darín's demolitions engineer in 'Bombita' is precisely that character. A towing agency, a municipal window, an accumulating pettiness with no proportionate answer available anywhere inside it. Antonioni would let the office absorb him. Neorealism would set him walking. Szifron takes the identical broken circuit and closes it with an explosive charge. The response isn't adequate — nothing about a bomb is adequate to an impound fee — and that inadequacy is the signature of the impulse rather than a flaw in the plotting. Wild Tales is a popular counter-proposal to modern cinema's answer. Instead of the seer, the detonator.

'El más fuerte' also shows how much classical grammar Szifron can still play straight. Deleuze describes the large action form as a kind of breathing: the vast milieu, then the taut line of the act, then the milieu again. Patagonia opens out, the two vehicles converge to a line, the landscape opens again. It's the oldest duel structure there is, force against force, and the debt is direct: Duel, an anonymous antagonist, a petty slight escalated to mortal combat, staged in wide empty-landscape framing. Duel keeps its antagonist faceless. Szifron gives his a face and a plausible life, which makes the escalation worse rather than better.

The other debts are just as specific. The anthology template is commedia all'italiana — I nuovi mostri and its self-contained cruel vignettes, each engineered toward a savage moral punchline, arranged for cumulative bite instead of connective tissue. There's no wraparound here, no converging fates, no shared cast, so the running order has to do all the work, and it does. Tonal control, murder kept elegant and ironic rather than lurid, comes from Kind Hearts and Coronets. Escalating institutional absurdity by airtight comic logic until it releases as deadpan catastrophe is Dr. Strangelove's method. 'Bombita' is unthinkable without Falling Down's everyman curdling under bureaucratic humiliation. And the house sensibility is literal, not spiritual: El Deseo produced the film, and the Almodóvar of Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown is audible in every saturated high-key frame where melodrama leans into farce and transgression is made pleasurable.

So what did it do to the art? Two things. It made the impulse-image popular. Deleuze's naturalists are difficult company, and Szifron gave their structure an architecture so tight that a mainstream audience would sit through six consecutive descents and come out exhilarated. That's a formal achievement, not just a commercial one. And it re-argued the anthology as a form. Most anthology films are compilations; this one uses sequencing the way a single film uses editing, tuning the register from the cold shock of the opening through the queasy middle to the sustained set-piece at the end. Its forward lineage is still being written. What it proved travels, though: a subtitled Argentine anthology reached Cannes competition, an Academy Award nomination and a genuinely wide audience, which is a permission other filmmakers now have.

Here's what to watch on a rewatch. Not the explosions. Watch the first ninety seconds of each tale, where nothing is happening and the frame is at its most orderly, because that's where Szifron hides what's coming. And sit with the question the film declines to close. If the drive was already down there in the milieu, the slight on the highway didn't cause anything. It only gave permission. Which means the film isn't really about anger. It's about how much weight the ordinary world can take before something underneath comes up through the floor.