Mark Twain’s quote that virtue has never been as respectable as money could easily delineate the sumptuously sordid habitat limned in Azor, except that it’s precisely the kind of wisdom that the film’s wealthy habitués and their attendant financiers might invoke with complacent irony from within their insulated milieu of smoky parlours, agapanthus-lined lobbies, manicured hippodromes, and dutifully swept piscinas. Twain’s bon mot clearly undervalued the insatiability of capital accumulation, and in Andreas Fontana’s feature debut the Swiss private banker and his wife who arrive in Buenos Aires circa 1980 are certainly no innocents abroad.
Still, the refined manner of the cosmopolitan M. Yvan de Wiel (Fabrizio Rongione), who is forced to liaise with foreign clients in the wake of his embedded colleague René Keys’ inexplicable disappearance, identifies him as a sympathetic enough character.
