Days of Hate (Leopoldo Torre Nilsson, 1954)

In its close concentration on an unhappily obsessed woman moving through a threat-laden environment, Leopoldo Torre Nilsson’s Days of Hate often feels strangely linked to a movie like John Parker’s Dementia, and not just because they’re both barely more than an hour long. For sure, it’s not a seamless correspondence: Dementia is fancifully and aggressively stylized, basing the woman’s trauma in a grotesque family tragedy; Days of Hate is always rooted in real settings – in the factory workplace and in the Buenos Aires streets – and the motivating event is much sadder. The fascinatingly grave Elisa Christian Galve plays Emma Zunz, her father dead by suicide after he was set up as the fall guy in a theft and her mother dead from grief; she fixates on getting revenge on the conniving, sleazy factory manager who set up the whole thing. The film is dense with problematic masculinity: the men are mostly dangerous pursuers and potential or actual rapists; others are psychically unsettling (on two separate occasions she refers in voice-over to the striking sadness of someone’s face) – even her love for her father manifests itself in a troublingly destabilizing form (the film shows that she remains capable of striking up connections, but they appear doomed to transience). The film is based on a short story by Borges, and although it doesn’t explicitly evoke the predominant notions of his work in that it’s not consciously labyrinthine or mythic, it carries a pervasive oneiric quality, the extremity of Emma’s focus on her quest creating its own unsettling texture. This carries through to the ending and beyond: she evades human justice, but feels already convicted by justice of another kind, and is last seen wandering the city as if zombie-like, perpetually removed and separated. Borges was apparently disappointed in the film, but on its own terms it’s unerringly full and fascinating.