Irene (Soledad Villamil, centre) and Benjamin (Ricardo Darin, right) find their attempts to bring a killer to justice thwarted by Argentina's "dirty war" in the Oscar-winning thriller The Secret in Their Eyes. (Maria Antolini/Sony Pictures Classics)

Once again, Academy Awards voters showed their conventional tastes by giving this year’s foreign-language Oscar to Argentina’s The Secret in Their Eyes. Juan José Campanella’s romantic thriller is an artfully crafted melodrama, but it’s not in the same class as Michael Haneke’s The White Ribbon, the eerie, brilliant film that was favoured to win the prize.

The film may dabble in cerebral themes like the pain of memory and the catharsis of art, but it’s a contrived tale of unrequited love and revenge.

Like last year’s surprise winner, the sentimental Departures, The Secret in Their Eyes is the kind of movie Hollywood understands. The film may dabble in cerebral themes like the pain of memory and the catharsis of art, but at a gut level, it’s a contrived tale of unrequited love and revenge. Argentine director Campanella, a veteran of U.S. television whose credits include Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, draws on that experience as much as a 2005 novel by Eduardo Sacheri in constructing this high-brow procedural.

The story opens in 1999 Buenos Aires, where Benjamin Esposito (Ricardo Darin), a retired criminal investigator with the federal courts, is trying to grapple with a past case by writing a novel about it. Twenty-five years earlier, he was assigned to investigate the brutal rape and murder of a beautiful young schoolteacher (Carla Quevedo) married to a bank clerk (Pablo Rago). The homicide that still troubles him. Faced with writer’s block, Benjamin pays a visit to the judge, Irene Menendez Hastings (Soledad Villamil), who was his superior at the time of the case, in the hope that rehashing it with her will kick-start his book. When we discover that Benjamin was smitten with Irene back in 1974, we begin to sense there may be an ulterior motive for his desire to reconnect with her.

Screenwriters Campanella and Sacheri feed us only bits and pieces of the full story as the film repeatedly flashes back to the mid-1970s and Benjamin’s original investigation. After his crooked rival at the courts ostensibly solves the case – beating false confessions out of two construction workers who were near the scene of the crime – Benjamin goes rogue in an effort to find the real murderer.

What follows is the most inspired – and wittiest – part of the movie, in which Benjamin teams with his assistant, a wry boozehound named Pablo Sandoval (Guillermo Francella), to do some off-duty sleuthing. The two are convinced Gomez (Javier Godino), a childhood friend of the victim, is the killer and set out to prove it. Their bumbling attempt to break into his mother’s house in Chivilcoy and steal a cache of letters is staged with a fine balance of suspense and comedy. (It’s a reminder that Campanella’s TV work also includes episodes of 30 Rock and House.)

This superb second act comes to a virtuoso climax when Benjamin and Pablo finally track down Gomez and foolishly try to apprehend him in a packed soccer stadium. Campanella and cinematographer Felix Monte shoot the scene Touch of Evil style, as one complex five-minute take that swoops over the game in progress, plunges into the teeming stands and winds up with a chase in the bowels of the building. (Technically, it’s not really one take. It’s composed of seven different shots seamlessly welded in post-production by Campanella, who also does his own editing.)

In the third act, the film shifts to a dark, maudlin tone. Argentine history, which has stayed in the shadows until now, asserts itself, as Benjamin’s drive for justice runs up against the dirty tactics of the Peronist government just before the 1976 military coup. The Benjamin-Irene subplot also asserts itself, as his torch-carrying for his former boss finds a parallel in the widowed bank clerk’s devotion to his dead wife. It’s the weakest part of the picture, as the story descends into romantic cliché and an In the Bedroom-type denouement that is meant to be powerful and profound, but really just strains credulity.

Legal colleagues Irene and Benjamin grow intimate while trying to crack a murder case in The Secret in Their Eyes. (Maria Antolini/Sony Pictures Classics)

But the acting is first-rate throughout. As Benjamin, Darin (Nine Queens) is an appealingly vulnerable crime fighter – introspective, nervous and shy. In contrast, Villamil’s Cornell-educated Irene is a cool specimen of 1970s feminism who proves she can break a stubborn male suspect without resorting to fists or rubber hoses – she goes straight for the ego. And as the film flips back and forth between the ’70s and ’90s, the two actors (and their makeup artists) achieve one of the more graceful feats of onscreen aging.

It’s Francella, however, who almost steals the show. The popular Argentine comedian, looking a little like bespectacled Scottish comic Ronnie Corbett, gives the most textured performance as the smart, lazy Pablo. Almost without us realizing it, he takes the character from amusing drunken sidekick to tragic alcoholic and, finally, to self-sacrificing hero.

I found myself admiring the art of The Secret in Their Eyes without being moved by it. Those false notes we’ve come to accept from standard American commercial filmmaking are jarring when applied to a presumably superior foreign production. Why are the victims in these stories always beautiful young women? Why, in a modern drama, are we expected to believe that characters would spend a large part of their lives in pining, mourning and exacting revenge?

No wonder The Secret in Their Eyes won an Oscar. Campanella has made a better Hollywood film in Argentina than most of the movies coming out of Hollywood right now.

In Spanish, with English subtitles.

The Secret in Their Eyes (El secreto de sus ojos) opens in Toronto and Vancouver on April 23.

Martin Morrow writes about the arts for CBC News.