Ricardo Darín and the Animal Gaze:Celebrity and Anonymity in El aura Jeffrey Zamostny In the brief making-of video included on the IFC Films release of Argentine director Fabián Bielinsky’s 2005 film El aura, Bielinsky claims that Ricardo Darín portrays a character “muy, muy, muy diferente de cualquier cosa que haya hecho [antes].” The film, a noir-inflected psychological thriller for which Darín won a Silver Condor for best actor in 2006, throws his novel performance into relief against a backdrop of allusions to his most prominent previous roles.1 From the outset, El aura draws connections between Darín’s character and his high-profile appearances in earlier Argentine blockbusters. Rather than providing viewers with the pleasure of recognition and familiarity, however, these fleeting continuities frustrate viewer expectations as it becomes clear that Darín’s character is not a new incarnation of his established screen personae. El aura breaks with earlier films featuring Darín by imbuing his performance with qualities often associated with the acting in New Argentine Cinema, which I define here as the low-budget, experimental films that emerged in Argentina in the late 1990s and that registered the impact of neoliberalism on contemporary Argentine society and filmmaking.2 In particular, Darín is anonymous, intensely observant, and physically vulnerable in his role as an unnamed taxidermist. In what follows, I examine each of these attributes in turn to show how they relate to the film’s single most successful strategy for defamiliarizing Darín: bringing him into sustained contact, often via the gaze, with animals and human animality. In addition to previous criticism regarding El aura, my discussion draws on three related areas of research: (1) analyses of acting in New Argentine Cinema, (2) Walter Benjamin’s use of the term aura, and (3) theoretical contributions to Animal Studies emphasizing the auratic animal gaze. Viewing the film through these lenses, I contend that the title of El aura refers not only to the moment before the epileptic attacks suffered by the taxidermist, as described in the story, but also to the film’s central challenges: to divest Darín of his celebrity “personality,” to endow him with “the unique aura of the person,” and to render him strange in the penetrating gazes of anonymous, enigmatic animals (Benjamin 1177). [End Page 154] Defamiliarizing Darín In contrast to Bielinsky’s fast-paced crime drama Nueve reinas (2000), the first of his two feature films, El aura condenses a week’s worth of action in a measured, 133-minute narrative. Captions interspersed throughout the film signal that the predominately linear plot begins on a Wednesday and ends seven days later. During that time, the camera undertakes what Bielinsky has called in an interview “el estudio obsesivo de un personaje, el seguimiento constante y en primera persona de un ser oscuro, aislado” (“La mirada”). Several prominent shots do in fact track Darín’s character from behind, causing viewers to share the perspective of the laconic, aloof taxidermist. An aging lower-middle-class inhabitant of Buenos Aires, the protagonist would be unremarkable were it not for his sporadic epileptic seizures and his photographic memory, which he uses to amuse himself imagining ingenious, non-violent robberies. When his alienated wife finally leaves him for good, he accepts his fellow taxidermist Sontag’s invitation to go hunting in Patagonia. There, he stumbles upon an opportunity to put his criminal plans into practice when he accidentally shoots the huntsman Dietrich, who turns out to have planned a heist to rob a casino on its closing day. Although the taxidermist manages to insert himself into the robbery in place of Dietrich, a slip of his memory compounded with one of his epileptic fits leads to the death of everyone involved in the heist except himself. In the final scene, a variation on the opening credits, the protagonist stuffs a lizard in his workshop in the company of Dietrich’s wolf-like dog. Whereas viewers are left wondering whether the taxidermist salvaged the money from the casino, there can be no doubt that he failed to commit the clever, tidy crime of his dreams. In addition...