Borges Film – Días de odio

Días de odio
Days of Hatred

1954, Argentina, B&W, 66 minutes

Directed by Leopoldo Torre Nilsson.
Screenplay by Leopoldo Torre Nilsson, based on “Emma Zunz” by Jorge Luis Borges.
Cinematography by Enrique Wallfisch.
Music by J. Rodríguez Fauré.
Produced by Armando Bó.

Cast
Elisa Galvé — Emma Zunz
Nicolás Fregues — Plesner
Enrique de Pedro — The Father
Raúl del Valle — The Sailor

Synopsis

Emma Zunz is a lonely woman whose father was framed for embezzlement by his colleague, a corrupt industrialist named Plesner. After her father commits suicide in prison, Emma plots her revenge. Obtaining a job at Plesner’s textile factory, Emma claims to have information regarding an imminent workers’ strike, and makes an appointment to see him. Prior to the meeting, Emma picks up a sailor at a local dive bar and has sex in the cribs next door. Arriving at Plesner’s office, she asks for a glass of water. Emma uses this opportunity to steal the revolver from Plesner’s desk, shooting him fatally upon his return. Carefully disheveling her clothing, Emma dials the police. She claims that Plesner raped her, and the shooting is declared a justifiable act of self-defense.

Comments

The Argentine writer and filmmaker Edgardo Cozarinsky writes about Días de odio in his 1980 book, Borges In/And/On Film:

Borges did not like this first film adaptation of one of his texts, and he did not miss any opportunity to make his displeasure known. The film’s faults are obvious, but they matter less than its good points. Upon completing the film, Torre Nilsson himself stated that he had planned for Días de odio to last, ideally, only twenty-five minutes (“Historia de una película,” Gente de cine 29, Buenos Aires, January–February 1954); but the three-part film he intended it for was never made, so the script had to be expanded into a feature-length film. Consequently, it became necessary to invent additional scenes and these blurred the story’s linear pattern, or, more precisely, its “effect of linearity” since a careful reading reveals a constant interplay among the story’s various levels. As for Borges, he collaborated closely with the director in writing the script and did not object to having his name included in the credits.

Without either favoring fidelity to its literary source or disdaining the movie industry’s conventions, one still feels that the film would benefit from the elimination of its “romantic interest,” of the couple’s encounter in a wintry park—conceived as a counterpart to their loneliness—that culminates when they escape from a noisy birthday party by taking refuge in a kitchen. Similarly, the film would benefit from the cutting of its “comic relief”: a colorful tough, who, in the purely verbal context, say, of “The Intruder” may appear an acceptable archetype, but who cannot hold up under the film’s precise observation of his battered, broadbrimmed hat, his silk handkerchief, wrinkles, and whiskey voice. Still, these distractions are well thought out according to a classical model of narrative construction that defines character by means of incidental situations that establish the basis for later development. For example, Emma’s hesitant contact with a melancholy suitor illustrates her sexual timidity, which is crucial to the credibility of her alibi and her gruesome vengeance, while the tough’s protecting her lets Emma glimpse a kind of night-life that becomes part of her plan. The film also invents good sequences, such as the anonymous funeral cortege that Emma follows when she cannot attend her own father’s funeral, and these inventions seem equally as characteristic of the writer as of the director. (In his 1956 film El Protegido, for which he alone wrote the script, Torre Nilsson had planned to include a brief, isolated flashback to the fiction created by the characters, who are movie people, from their fictitious “real life.” Today, critics would call that moment “Borgesian.”)

Some thirty years after the fact, it is even more interesting to take note of what Torre Nilsson attempted in this his first full-length film (excluding, of course, El crimen de Oribe, 1950, based on Bioy Casares’s “El perjurio de la nieve,” which he codirected with his father, Leopoldo Torres Rios). Nothing in the Argentine cinema of its time resembles Días de odio. In 1953, only Bresson’s Diary of a Country Priest and Astruc’s Le rideau cramoisi (The Crimson Curtain) had tried to relate a highly literary story, told on the soundtrack, with a plot reduced almost entirely to a single character. In Torre Nilsson’s experiment, the infrequent gestures, the frames chosen to emphasize rather than mask the absence of conventional drama, the extremely rich soundtrack—where a radio has been left playing and Emma hears it on reviving from a faint, or where the wind rustles clotheslines in a hotel patio for hours on end—indicate the kind of work with film language that attracted the director. Días de odio revealed Torre Nilsson’s sense of his medium, which would grow even sharper in his later films but had already begun to emerge with all the impatience and boldness of every first work.

On the other hand, the story’s paradoxical relationship between truth and verisimilitude mattered less to Torre Nilsson than did the character’s loneliness, from which Torre Nilsson derived his own emotional attitude toward the film. “As the film began to take shape in my mind, it started to take on a meaning of its own,” the  director explained in the article already cited. “At that point, ‘Emma Zunz’ stopped being the story of a girl seeking a perfect way to avenge her father’s disgrace and death. It became the story of solitude opposed to community. In Días de odio I tried to show more than the reversals of plot and psychology; I tried to show the repetitive counterpoint of man and society.” From this premise Torre Nilsson derived his diligent elaboration of the plot’s secondary action, so that situations occasionally take on sufficient density to cover up the cast’s deficiencies. The transformation of Buenos Aires into an ambience defined by a single character also derives from that premise: even though Emma’s isolation is motivated novelistically, her solitary pilgrimage, which today seems to anticipate Antonioni’s passive heroines, is set in a hostile city, a humiliating factory, a room in a depressing boarding house. This romantic pessimism also proved unusual in Argentine films of the Peronist period, which had been indifferently optimistic, vigorously ineffectual. By way of contrast, the film produced a realistic effect, subsequently eroded, while the “will to style” impressed on every aspect of the film remains undiminished.

—Edgardo Cozarinsky

Additional Information

Días de odio
You can watch the entire film on YouTube in the original Spanish.

Wikipedia Page
Wikipedia hosts a brief page on Días de odio.

IMDB Page
The Internet Movie Database features a profile of Días de odio.

Author: Allen B. Ruch
Last Modified: 25 August 2024
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