Andreas Fontana on ‘Azor’: ‘The movie is about power’
The Hindu
The director says conversations can be used to signify power — who speaks and who is silent is an indication of that balance
Azor is a quietly unsettling film following Yvan (Fabrizio Rongione), a private banker, who arrives in Buenos Aires with his wife Ines (Stéphanie Cléau) to an atmosphere thick with sinister sophistication. It is the 1980s and in the midst of a military dictatorship; a time of uneasy alliances. Yvan should negotiate a path in this cauldron of cut-throat suspicion, looking for clues of his mysteriously missing colleague, René Keys, who is described variously as charming as well as someone not to be trusted.
Names are important for director Andreas Fontana (39), who makes an assured debut with Azor. “A name is a little thing, but it defines your history,” the Swiss director says over a video call from Geneva. “It is like a historical or social code. It was important for me to play with that. So Keys is a key to the film of course but also a reference to Colonel Kurtz in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.”
There are echoes of Conrad’s 1899 novella and Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979) in Azor. “The structure of the novel, a journey into darkness, makes it easy to imagine and adapt into film.”