Review: THE INVISIBLE EYE – Presented by the TIFF Bell Lightbox
At once a caustic political allegory and a compelling study in pathological repression, The Invisible Eye, from 35-year-old Argentine auteur Diego Lerman, bears many of the hallmarks of the brilliant Michael Haneke. Indeed, Lerman’s film – about an emotionally and sexually stifled young supervisor in an elite, junta-era Buenos Aires high school – is particularly reminiscent of Haneke’s celebrated La Pianiste. Happily, neither Lerman, nor The Invisible Eye, itself, are unduly flattered by the comparison. Lead actress Julieta Zylberberg, too, shares richly in that commendation. Hers is a terrific, intensely austere performance – alternately coldly domineering and furtively perverse – evoking Isabelle Huppert’s deranged, iconic turn.
As the dour, 23-year-old Maria, Zylberberg diligently marshals the pupils of the Colegio Nacional, a venerable institution dedicated to the instruction of the “Moral Sciences” (also the title of Martin Kohan’s award-winning novel, from which the film was adapted). Under the auspices of Argentina’s violently authoritarian regime (1976-83), that term essentially comes to mean “the unquestioning adherence to one’s superiors, on pain of swift and severe reprisal.” (Unsurprisingly, The White Ribbon, Haneke’s recent authoritarian parable, is another oft-cited point of comparison.)
Overseeing Maria’s efforts is the zealous, and increasingly lecherous superintendent Biasutto (Osmar Nunez), a distinguished veteran of the Dirty War, and personification of the brutish hypocrisies of the military government. Cautioning Maria that “subversion is like a cancer”, and that she must be wary of even the slightest infractions, he advises that she surveil her students unceasingly, and, in turn, is keen to keep close observation of her progress.
As it happens, with respect to one pupil in particular, Maria is in little need of encouragement. Instead, she employs Biasutto’s instructions as a convenient pretext to gratify her curiously salacious fixation. Though she shares a bedroom with her grandmother, and is generally abhorrent of the sexual advances of her peers, she quickly acquires a taste for peeping at the object of her obsession from the confines of a boys room stall. Emboldened to the point of recklessness, Maria’s undoing is long foreshadowed, though, in true Haneke-like fashion, the details of the film’s didactically loaded resolution remain genuinely shocking when they arrive.
Co-Presented in association with the Global Film Initiative, The Invisible Eye screens exclusively at the TIFF Bell Lightbox, through June 1. Visit www.Tiff.net for show times and ticketing details.
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