THE LONELY HEIST

The Aura

The Aura is a small movie with big dreams. It toys with the heist genre, wielding the audacity of a French New Wave experiment, then pads out the running time with additional levels of subtlety—some more successful than others. Argentinean director Fabián Bielinsky (who passed away this June) focuses on a nameless taxidermist (the wonderfully subdued Ricardo Darín, who also starred in Bielinsky’s first film, Nine Queens) with dreams of a life drenched in thievery and espionage, an admittedly more exciting prospect than the droll routine of stuffing fluff into expired animals. He becomes animated with childish delight while recounting his hypothetical how-to scenario for the perfect bank robbery to a colleague. As the two men stand in line to make a deposit, the plan is acted out according to the taxidermist’s inventive scheme. It isn’t an altogether untenable operation, but cold truth rushes in as our hero realizes a genuine predicament: Such ambitious movie fantasies don’t match his timid tranquility. “Who do you think you are,” mocks the colleague, “Billy the Kid?”

Read the rest of the review in the New York Press...