Deadline: The Clan, Argentina’s official submission in the Oscars’ foreign language category, tells the true story of one of the country’s strangest and grisliest crimes. It details the notorious Puccio family, who in the early 1980s kidnapped four people and murdered three of them. It was suspected at the time that the family patriarch, Arquímedes Puccio, had ties to forced disappearances during Argentina’s dirty war of the 1970s and early 80s, though these particular crimes were for ransom and not, apparently, politics. The film focuses on the relationship between Arquímedes and his son, Alejandro an aspiring rugby player who idolizes his father until he’s forced to recognize the man he worships is a cold blooded killer. (In real life, Arquímedes and Alejandro both received life sentences for their roles in the crimes.)
AVClub: Nothing says respectable like a good, solid family business. The Clan, a middling drama that set an opening-weekend box-office record in Argentina last August, revolves around the real-life Puccios, a tight-knit family of seven who in the 1980s lived above their corner storefront in the San Isidro neighborhood of Buenos Aires. But all the members of the middle-class household look the other way when it comes to the nasty enterprise that actually has them upwardly mobile: Patriarch Arquímedes (Guillermo Francella), who helped disappear dissidents as an intelligence officer for the recently fallen military dictatorship, has adapted his expertise to put some ransom money into his own coffers. And he even drafts one of his sons, well-known national-team rugby player Alejandro (Peter Lanzani), as his right-hand man in the kidnapping scheme.
The Wrap
Argentina’s totalitarian regime of the late 1970s made an invaluable contribution to the lexicon of euphemism by giving us the verb “to disappear,” a graceful way of describing the act of kidnapping and murdering political dissidents. In “The Clan,” based on the true story of a family that ran a lucrative enterprise snatching wealthy people for sizable ransoms during that bleak period, we see that the trickle-down theory applies both to euphemism and to Fascism.
Variety: Argentine powerhouse Pablo Trapero (“Carancho,” “White Elephant”) takes a case so upsetting many refused to believe it was possible and retells it in ghastly detail from the p.o.v. of the perpetrators in “The Clan,” a muscular, Hollywood-style account of the Puccio fiasco, in which a relatively well-to-do San Isidro family kidnapped their rich neighbors in order to extort ransoms from their relatives. Opening nearly 30 years after the Puccios’ sensational arrest, the film has been an explosive success back home, raising the bar for strongest opening ever for an Argentine film with half a million admissions in four days, before heading to competition berths at the Venice and Toronto film festivals, sure to propel this vicious Almodovar brothers-produced crime saga onto the world stage.
