White Elephant (15)

White Elephant (originally Elefante blanco) is still showing in select art-house cinemas.

This review was first published in The Methodist Recorder (www.methodistrecorder.co.uk).

White Elephant (15)

White Elephant, by Argentinian director Pablo Trapero tells the story of Julián, a Catholic priest who has dedicated his efforts to aiding a housing project and pastoring the residents of a slum in Buenos Aries.  He persuades his old friend Nicolás, a younger and less experienced priest to join him and share the pressures faced serving the tumultuous slum community, plagued by drugs and organised crime.

The film starts at a leisurely pace which isn’t initially grabbing, but once Nicolás joins Julian at the slum (known as Ciudad Oculta, which means Hidden City) the story develops a sense of urgency and realism which is impossible to look away from.  Unexpected violence erupts from nowhere and the harsh realities of slum life are brought to the screen; it’s a harrowing dose of reality.  The White Elephant of the title is a huge unfinished hospital building, casting an ominous shadow over Ciudad Oculta.  Window and doorless, it now serves as housing and a tutoring centre.

The priests are portrayed as flawed but genuine in their attempts to be guiding lights in a community lost in darkness.  Their humanity isn’t glossed over, as Nicolás struggles with feelings of attraction to new colleague Luciana, a secular social worker with whom he has to work frequently in high pressure conditions, and in whom he tellingly confides, “How can my desire for a family live alongside my calling?”  Meanwhile Julián has to deal with the frustration that his senior clergyman don’t have the same priorities that he does for the projects in the slum.

Ricardo Darín is solid as Julián, convincingly generating the sort of humble charisma that might earn the respect of such hoodlums as he works with.  Jérémie Renier gives the character of Nicolás a kind of everyman relatability, and Martina Gusman sparkles as his temptress Luciana.  Guillermo Nieto’s accomplished cinematography is sumptuous and immediate, and the score by Michael Nyman is serviceable if not memorable.  Content-wise the film earns it’s 15 certificate thanks to frequent strong language (subtitled), a sex scene with brief nudity, drug use and of course the violence.

Being rooted in such sobering realities the script is largely (but thankfully not entirely) humourless, so don’t expect anything ‘feel good’, but rather a complex and open ended insight into the everyday struggles of a distant land.  White Elephant shines as a riveting, beautifully filmed slice of life.