As De Wiel visits the living rooms, swimming pools and exclusive clubs of the rich, the violence of the nation remains off-camera, but the angst never leaves the frame. Not least because it is unclear where a banker's loyalty might lie if the military suddenly had an "El Dorado" of seized assets that only someone with French cuffs and a Swiss passport could easily liquidate. The film's title is a bank code word for "shut up, watch your mouth," and the story favors the horrors of the unsaid.
American viewers will find that "Azor" – the first feature-length film by Swiss director Andreas Fontana, now streaming on Mubi – is a minimalist departure from U.S. films about high finance that can't help but usually explain themselves out loud. In Oliver Stone's 1987 "Wall Street," financier Gordon Gekko summed up the intellectual status of a decade of deregulation, junk bonds, leveraged buyouts and organized labor retreat in his iconic "greed is good" speech. Martin Scorsese's "Wolf of Wall Street" (2013) drinks champagne from the same Reagan-era flute. "I want you to solve your problems by getting rich," Leonardo DiCaprio's Jordan Belfort admonishes a crowd of ecstatic traders.
In the 2011 "Margin Call," which depicts the beginning of the 2008 financial crisis, a mid-level trader played by Paul Bettany rages unapologetically against John Q. Publics who were satisfied with Wall Street's toxic adjustable-rate mortgages when it meant bigger houses and fatter 401(k) accounts for the little guy. "They want what we have to offer them, but they also want to play innocent and pretend they have no idea where this is coming from," he complains from his convertible. When the antiheroes are in charge, they get to make the speeches.
Recent Hollywood treatments of finance have become didactic to the point of agitprop, coinciding with a realignment of American politics in which Republicans have become more trade-protectionist and young people more socialist. To dramatize the planet's absurdly complex 2008 financial crisis for his 2015 film "The Big Short," Adam McKay cast Margot Robbie to sit in a bubble bath, sip champagne and break the fourth wall to explain mortgage-backed securities directly to viewers. Steven Soderbergh's 2019 film "The Laundromat" borrowed the same device for Antonio Banderas and Gary Oldman, who wore garish tuxedos as they let the audience in on the secrets of global offshore banking. It's art about capital that desperately hopes you get the message.
"Azor" skips the narrative tricks and sticks to the less macho world of Swiss private banking, where families often run banks that are passed down from generation to generation. "It's a very specific milieu, quite powerful and discreet," Fontana says. Fontana's grandfather had been a banker, and Fontana was intrigued by a posthumous diary entry about a 1980 visit to Argentina that never mentioned the political situation "off-screen in the notebook". (It mentioned the American election of Ronald Reagan as president.)
Swiss director Andreas Fontana at a film festival in Berlin in June.
(Stefanie Loos / Associated Press)
Fontana decided that the screenplay – which, he stressed, was not biographical – should also "show only what was absolutely necessary and everything else to let the audience imagine it". He strove to be sociologically "accurate" to the setting by casting the picture's Argentine characters with amateur actors from the country's real elite. "The casting director called me the snake charmer," Fontana says of the recruiting process. "If I were a journalist, they certainly wouldn't have worked on this project."
The film's main character, De Wiel, played by actor Fabrizio Rongione, has inherited a bank and a large house in Geneva from his father, but De Wiel seems to lack the charm, awareness and cunning of his missing partner Keys shortly after investigating a potential client nicknamed "Lazaro". While the bank is De Wiel's fortune, it is his wife Ines (played by Stephanie Cleau) who is the real brains of the operation. Their marriage and gender imbalances are the other major conflict beneath the film's surface.
Ines can read a room better than her husband, can calm people down and therefore has to constantly explain to him what is really happening. She knows what jackets her husband should wear to make his shoulders look more imposing. "My husband and I are one and the same person – him," Ines confides to a client. After her gender prevents her from attending a meeting at a racetrack and her husband meets and loses a client, she bristles at his ineffectiveness. "Your father was right," she tells him. "Fear makes mediocre."
Like many financial films, "Azor" is ultimately more of a success story than a hero's journey. De Wiel leaves the country estates and hotel swimming pools in which he is comfortable for a journey into the wilderness that even his fellow Swiss merchants have shied away from. "The war is won on the front lines," a sinister customer, a junta priest with a penchant for currency speculation, reminds De Wiel before the trip. The film's conclusion tells an even darker story about Swiss private finance than most American films about Wall Street.
After Fontana gave an interview to The Times for this story, Fontana reflected on his research process in a follow-up email. "You should know that during my research I met about ten private bankers, one of whom has since committed suicide and the other has disappeared, no one knows what happened to him," Fontana says. "It is an environment without oxygen, even without love, I would say." In Geneva, Fontana says, there is a local saying "that the children of bankers, if they are not bankers themselves, are artists or junkies". He adds, "It's a terrible phrase."