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It’s a shame that Intacto won’t be seen by more people,
not because they’d all fall in love with this tense tale of
kismet, but rather I think it would sharply divide opinions
and generate the kind of heated discussions that just aren’t
being provoked by many American films this year.
The movie is grounded on an audacious premise that there’s
a select group of people out there with the mixed blessing
of being able to absorb luck and to some degree control their
fortunes. The benefits of such a gift are obvious. For instance,
the main character Tomas (Sbaraglia) miraculously manages
to survive an airplane crash at the film’s beginning. But
there are consequences to those around you, whom you may inadvertently
divest of their own luck. Such is the case for a detective
whose jinx caused her family’s death.
Surviving the plane crash leads Tomas to Fredrico (Poncela),
who works as an insurance agent primarily to discover new
talent for clandestine games of chance played by such gifted
individuals. It’s these games that really give Spanish director
Fresnadillo his best set pieces. Imaginative, tense,
and funny, these scenes suggest Cronenberg, or perhaps
a more serious Lynch, and show Fresnadillo to be a
genuine talent.
Fredrico coercively initiates Tomas into this strange underground
with hopes of revenge against the “God of chance,” a Jewish
gambler who stripped Fredrico of his own gift. This mysterious
fellow (played by Bergman favorite Von Sydow)
survived the Holocaust and now conducts an especially lethal
game of Russian roulette (five loaded chambers) which is the
pinnacle of all these bizarre games.
It’s in the turgid and needlessly dense details that Intacto
sometimes runs aground. The tenets of the power are difficult
to distinguish. Likewise the purpose of the games and the
characters’ motivations are similarly opaque, all of which
serves to estrange us from the characters. It’s only Lopez’s
jinxed detective, Sara, who really resonates. Were it not
for the talent of Fresnadillo, the whole film would likely
be dismissible as a cold abstraction, but he somehow manages
to imbue the nonsense with a palpable sense of mysticism that
makes you suspend disbelief and simply marvel at his construction.
—Edward Rholes
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