Relatos Salvajes: A Darkly Hilarious Guide to Breaking those 2024 Resolutions

Image: Lucash, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Whether you’re a diehard resolution keeper or Dry January’s trusty one-week-wonder, most of us have set some aspirations on how best to improve our lives in 2024. New year’s resolutions are often targeted at fixing undesired traits or behaviours like biting your nails, grazing, laziness- or… pinning your hit and run on your housekeeper? Damián Szifron’s 2014 wonderfully twisted dark-comedy Relatos Salvajes is an outright celebration of all things sinful, vengeful and wicked. In fact, this film could be seen as the ultimate spoof on new year’s resolutions, brazenly mocking those who strive to be kind, while two onscreen strangers road rage to the death. Almost every vice is on display: from adultery to cold-blooded murder, this portmanteau film should leave its viewers troubled with its content, and yet its style is so exquisitely wacky that one can only revel in Szifron’s ingenuity and sense of humour. The film is composed of six relatos (short tales), each one a pantomime of crime, crudity and unapologetic misanthropy.

After watching the film for the first time, my immediate thought was that Mariana Enriquez and Damián Szifron should definitely collaborate: albeit lacking Szifron’s humorous edge, a cinematic version of “Las cosas que perdimos en el fuego” or “Los peligros de fumar en la cama” would not only be visually exciting, but also a fascinating fusion between two Argentinians who take horror and violence as their chief protagonists. Szifron’s characters casually discuss homicidal plots and keenly fight to the death, all with a manic glint of glee in their eyes. Admittedly, the premise that horror and violence may also bring delight and relief is contradictory, yet the timely doses of humour injected by Szifron effectively soothe this conflict. Unravelling the darkest corners of human nature, Relatos Salvajes might just be the perfect antidote to the conventional pursuit of self-betterment, imploring viewers to release their inhibitions, lose control and give way to their primal instincts- especially in conditions of injustice.

The setting of contemporary Argentina provides the root for many of the frustrations experienced by the characters in the film, exploring themes of corporate corruption, mind-numbing bureaucracy and the insidious classism present in society. The numerous instances of the ever-present dictum “documento por favor”(“documents please”) in the film did not go unnoticed after spending a year in Buenos Aires, where I had to bring my passport everywhere, even to classes- which, in a city known for street theft, was not the most relaxing of experiences. Two of the relatos stand out as social critiques of Argentina: “Bombita” and “El más fuerte”. The latter concerns two men from different social classes - one in a suit and sunglasses driving a sports car across the North-western Argentine highway, and the other in a battered, rusty vehicle. They become mutually embroiled in road-rage, which escalates and quickly becomes the visceral and murderous incarnation of class conflict. Szifron artfully contrasts the sublime beauty of the vast red-rock canyons of the Quebrada and road-side shrines with depraved humanity. The richer man calls his highway foe a “negro resentido”, a classist affront symptomatic of growing inequality and class divide in economically unstable Argentina. There is no doubt that the word “negro” has racist origins, too. In Argentina, racism has largely taken the form of the erasure of Afro-Argentine and indigenous communities in cultural and historical representations of the country. Famously, Argentines refer to themselves as the “Europeans of South America”, the streets of Buenos Aires lined with Parisian-style cafes called “Le Blé” and buildings boasting colonial architecture. However, while racial language is ubiquitous in Argentine society, in this context and increasingly in modern Argentina, the concept of “negro” is displaced from its originary racialisation towards the idea of social class. In this relato, the other driver is not a black man: the word “negro” in Argentina seems to be so entrenched in everyday language that it has become a sweepingly generalised slur. Throughout the relato, each man at some point gains the upper hand, but the struggle ends in the entanglement of their brawling bodies, burnt to death in the suspended sports car. It is a display of class struggle made flesh - burned flesh.

“Bombita”, perhaps the most socially engaged, too, goes up in flames. A demolition expert falls victim to the arbitrary parking rules and farcical bureaucratic processes which they entail; he becomes increasingly frustrated, losing more and more money to parking fees, and begins to plot revenge- reinventing himself as a car-tow justice vigilante nicknamed “Bombita”. He becomes an internet sensation, engendering widespread activism against corruption. One tweet reads “la corrupción genera la violencia” (“corruption generates violence”), and accordingly, once he is swamped in an endless cycle of injustice he suffers at the hands of the car-tow company, Bombita bombs the towing office, becoming a hero to the people- and a criminal to the state. An Argentinian word comes to mind- “el prócer”: a national or cultural hero, often associated with Latin American independence. According to the press’s “official version” of events, the film tells us, he is a terrorist, while ordinary people revere him, calling on him to blow up the tax office next, using the hashtag #Bombita. The reference to the disparities between the “people’s history” and the official version is particularly hard-hitting in Argentina, as the details of its history of dictatorship and associated human rights abuses were long covered up in official accounts of history and in discourses. The ways in which characters escape the shackles of a fractured society are invariably and ludicrously violent in this film, but the violence enacted by these characters, it is suggested, pales in comparison to the violence perpetuated by corrupt societal mechanisms.

There are so many golden one-liners in this film which shed an exuberant light on often dark situations. The cumulative chaos in my favourite relato, “Hasta la muerte nos separe” made me laugh out loud, although I did admittedly already have a smile on my face, the porteño accents transporting me back to the streets of Buenos Aires with nostalgic delight. However, the events of the vignette are less joyful, despite the couple’s unlikely ‘happy’ ending. At her wedding ceremony, a jilted, bloody and utterly bedraggled bride discovers her husband’s infidelity, and she goes on a psychotic rampage. When her husband cowers in fear at his mother’s feet, she casually calls on the wedding photographer to capture the moment: “Filmame esto Nestor” (“film this for me Nestor”). Just as this moment of humiliation and violence is captured on film, Szifron’s anthology showcases shameful, unruly snippets of life for a larger audience. Although some of these violent moments, it is suggested, are generated by wider societal violence, most of these situations are everyday grievances which any spectator could relate to. Szifron sneers at politeness and civility, encouraging viewers to explode, rather than behave like law-abiding citizens in a system that does not benefit them.

 Overall, it is amusing to view the film as an irreverent take on resolutions, playfully contemplating the liberating joy of embracing our most devious inclinations, whilst also more subversively considering the root of this violence. So, a few months into 2024, if you’ve abandoned one or more resolutions, watch this film and you’re guaranteed to feel like a saint in comparison.