LION’S DEN
Directed by Pablo Trapero
Produced by Trapero & Youngjoo Suh
Written by Alejandro Fadel, Martín Mauregui, Sanitago Mitre & Trapero
Released by Strand Releasing
Spanish with English subtitles
Argentina. 113 min. Not Rated
With Martina Gusman, Elli Medeiros, Rodrigo Santoro & Laura García
 

It took more than a year, but finally Lion’s Den—which premiered at the 2008 Cannes Film Festival—opens in the States. It’s well worth the wait. This is the fifth film from Argentina’s Pablo Trapero, a director known for his focus on small-scale human dramas. Trapero conceived the idea as he drove past a large prison with his son, who noticed the walls had been painted pink. The unit housed mothers forced to raise their children while incarcerated.

Lion’s Den spends the majority of its 113 minutes inside one such prison. What makes the film so striking is not only its relentlessly unsentimental, gritty, and ugly a portrayal of prison life, but also its near-total absence of testosterone. Call it The Shawshank Inversion for both its gender-specificity and its thankful lack of wistful schmaltz. It helps that most of the film was shot on location in Argentinean maximum security prisons, with actual inmates and wardens as extras. The story involves Julia, played by Martina Gusman, who also executive produced. She awakes in her apartment to find her boyfriend and his male lover, Ramiro (Rodrigo Santoro), bloodied from an unseen struggle. Ramiro survives; her boyfriend does not. Julia is arrested and incarcerated in prison while she awaits a trial. Ramiro is allowed to go free.

Once Julia is in prison, we learn she is pregnant, at which point she’s assigned to a ward exclusively for women either with children or expecting. (Ramiro is the father, she claims.) It’s easy for us to anticipate the subsequent depictions of behind-bars unpleasantness. But Trapero avoids clichés because he is so creative with his camera, so skillful and deft in his execution that some scenes stand out simply due to technique. This is not to say that his methods are at all self-conscious (quite the opposite).

One particularly memorable scene involves the introduction of Marta (Laura García), a mother of two who acts as Julia’s caretaker. The scene starts in a tight shot with Julia, Marta, and several other inmates nude as they shower together. One of the women harasses Julia, groping her and making lewd comments. Marta comes to her rescue, and Julia manages to leave before Marta and the harasser begin a shoving match. As tensions escalate, the camera pulls back to a wide shot, and we see the two women pulling each other’s hair, writhing on the floor kicking and screaming. It’s almost a spectacle, a twisted mix of campy prison film and mud wrestling. But the sight is so damn unerotic and uncomfortable that its absurdity doesn’t override the dramatic weight. Simply put, it’s quite a scene.

As the story progresses, the child is born, and Julia has to deal with raising a son in a restrictive environment. She also receives visits from Ramiro and her mother (Elli Medeiros), both of whom want contact with the child and wish to see him spend time outside the prison walls. Trapero’s greatest achievement is allowing the audience not just to understand Julia’s isolation and powerlessness, but to experience it with frightening intimacy even though we’re not sure of her innocence. Gusman portrays Julia in a remarkably unglamorous fashion—nondescript, stone-faced, enigmatic, perhaps making her unlikable.

But ultimately, Trapero’s not interested in judging her character. The social conditions make such judgments almost irrelevant, and ultimately, we’re on Julia’s side because she is at odds with such a negligent, cruelly bureaucratic system. It’s to Trapero’s extreme credit that he centers his attention on someone as pedestrian as Julia. It might also be argued that she’s just a cipher, a vehicle to ignite in the audience a very deep-seated, innate passion for basic justice. Rich Zwelling
July 3, 2009