Lion's Den

Since his astonishing debut Crane World a decade ago, the Argentine Pablo Trapero has been quietly asserting himself as one of the world’s most singular directors. He’s perhaps best known for his breezy verité approach – shooting on location, often using non-actors, and drawing his subjects from everyday Argentine life. At the same time, Trapero has always dallied, slyly, with genre: Rolling Family might be called a road movie, El Bonaerense a cop drama, though each is subverted so as to accord with his desire to be true to quotidian reality.

Lion’s Den (Leonera) is a case in point. Ostensibly a prison movie, in Trapero’s hands the genre feels as fresh and reconfigured as it does in Jacques Audiard’s A Prophet. Shot in real prisons, and integrating professional actors with actual inmates, it can be seen as a continuation of his modus operandi. But there’s a sense, too, that with this film the director is beginning to flex his muscles, in terms of both technique and story; inching, quite consciously, towards an ever-greater audience.

It starts with a brilliant depiction of post-traumatic shock. Julia Zarate (Martina Gusman) wakes up in her apartment, showers, takes a train to work, sits in her office, distractedly scraping blood off her hands, takes the train home again, enters. Only then does she “see” and is overwhelmed by the violence she had left behind.

What immediately follows plays like a justice system procedural: from the crime scene, to the court where Julia is charged – for a murder she can’t remember committing – and refused bail, to her arrival in a women’s prison, all shown dialogue-light, matter-of-fact, almost documentary-style. This prologue, persuasive and absorbing, establishes the tone of the story that follows, of this young woman’s very particular time in prison.

For Julia is pregnant (the father, she claims, being the man she is accused of killing). As such, she is placed in a maternal cell block, occupied by women who are either pregnant or have their babies and toddlers with them before, at four years old, they must part company. Julia gives birth in confinement and then, as her case takes years to reach trial, fights for the right to have her child remain with her inside.

The plot is moved along by the four key relationships of Julia’s incarceration: with her mother, from whom she is estranged and who plays a malign role in the fate of the boy, Tomás; a fellow prisoner and mother, Marta (Laura Garcia); her co-defendant, Ramiro (Rodrigo Santoro), of whose sole guilt we can be reasonably sure; and with Tomás himself.

In the background, Trapero creates a palpable sense of life inside for these hard-luck mothers, most of whom are not as the middle-class Julia, but Marta, who when asked why she’s in jail answers: “Because I’m poor. Because I’m a fucking fool.” Trapero has a way of eliciting the most unaffected performances from his non-actors, and here is no exception. We believe their mutual dependency, their shared frustration when a newborn keeps the whole block awake, their defence of one another before the guards, in language so ferociously foul, it’s comic. All the while, passing time is measured by the growth of children, by a sunny parade to kindergarten and Santa dancing atop the prison walls.

But the film is chiefly characterised by two things: a knock-out central performance, and an overtly expressed film language. Gusman (who is also Trapero’s wife and executive producer) has a sullen, compelling intensity, as she conveys a young woman’s transition from vulnerable, shell-shocked innocent, to a hardened, determined, kick-ass ma. For his part, Trapero’s shot selection consciously shapes the storytelling.

He employs a mobile, often tracking camera to investigate the spaces inside the prison, notably in the introduction of the cell block - a majestic, waist-high tracking shot that presents not the usual array of gnarled jailbaits, but a roll call of babes in arms. A fixed camera is used where there is action or movement: a riot scene is made surreal not just by the fact that the rioters are women, but by the serenity of its framing. And close-ups heighten the sense of claustrophobia and entrapment. Such formal rigour, allied to such empathy for his characters, suggest a hugely confident director at the top of his game.

• Lion's Den opens in the UK on Friday.
• Lion's Den official website.
• Demetrios Matheou's The Faber Book of New South American Cinema is published later this year.
• Find El Bonaerense and Rolling Family on Amazon.