Rio Escondido

A strangely old-fashioned affair from Argentina revolving around one woman's curiosity over her husband who appears to be maintaining a second family elsewhere.

When happily married Anita opens an unusual looking airmail letter she finds at her husband's office she is sure that its contents mean he has another woman and child elsewhere in his hometown of Rio Escondido (Hidden River), near the Andes. On a whim she visits the town but finds an entirely different scenario, which begins to cause her to have doubts about her own home and relationship with her husband.

Though the premise of the film is an intriguing little set-up, which is never completely explained, it basically rests on the performance of Paula Krum as Anita to make the plot believable and involving. Thankfully she manages to convince and is ably assisted by a talented bunch of supporting characters, with the two young children in the cast, Tommy and Lucio, doing particularly well. The rugged male lead in Rio Escondido is also a delightfully complicated and suitably sexy mix of rawness, tenderness and danger. The lead up into a very old fashioned Brief Encounter-ish dilemma is credible despite little explanation for some of Anita's actions. Meanwhile Anita's husband is barely expanded, a little unfairly given his integral part in the plot and his wife's development.

Buenos Aires looks suitably sophisticated, with music and shooting styles to match, whilst the loving photography is reserved for the husband's hometown. Rio Escondido is filmed in long sweeping camera movements and careful colouring to emphasize the blue skies and the vastness of the wilderness complimented with a lovely Martin Bauer score of both strings and classic Argentinean guitar music.

A good and visually pleasing, if a touch dissatisfying, little piece that could just have easily been made 40 or 50 years ago.