Sex and violence mean one thing in Hollywood, quite another overseas. At any rate, it'll seem that way to anyone watching this week's most alarming foreign-language films: Francois Ozon's coming-of-age saga Jeune et Jolie, and the Argentine thriller The German Doctor.
The latter is directed by Lucia Puenzo, who is the daughter of Luis (The Official Story) Puenzo, and is equally adept at conjuring a mood of gathering dread from a story based in reality. The year is 1960, the place Patagonia. At a rest stop on an Argentine highway, a Jewish girl named Lilith (Florencia Bado) is speaking with a darkly handsome stranger (Alex Brendemuehl) about a doll that's fallen from her car. A doll her dad made. As the stranger hands it back, she asks him to guess her age, and he guesses 9.
She's actually 12, a fact she recalls in a voice-over, noting that he wrote it in his notebook saying she was "a perfect specimen, except for my height."
"Specimen."
The stranger is a German doctor, a new arrival in Argentina, who needs a place to stay, which makes him a good fit for this family. They've inherited a lakeside inn. He'll be their first guest, sharing dinner with them and answering their questions about his work, which is in genetics, involving growth hormones and cattle. Find the right genetic triggers, he says, and you can "improve the race."
"The race."
Though Lilith's mom (Natalia Oreiro) is glad to have a doctor nearby, since she's expecting, and their lakeside inn is far from the nearest town, Lilith's father (Diego Peretti) finds everything about this doctor unsettling — his offers of hormones to help Lilith grow taller, his interest in the family's soon-to-be-born twins, even his help with finding a factory to mass-produce dolls like the one Lilith dropped that day they met.
And director Lucia Puenzo knows she can make us unsettled, too, since we know a little something about high-profile Germans who sought refuge in Argentina after World War II. German expats are everywhere in this isolated region — filling a hacienda nearby, their children a substantial presence at Lilith's school. And that knowledge haunts a scene where doctor, dad and Lilith visit the doll factory and watch workers combine heads, torsos, limbs to manufacture a race of perfect, "superior" dolls.
The factory foreman asks Lilith's dad if he wants the dolls to have any distinguishing marks. Not seeing a connection we can now see clearly, he says, "No, I want them flawless."
The film takes its time, accumulating evidence, building dread, alarming us with a seeming normalcy that we're increasingly sure is anything but normal. The German Doctor is never showy or melodramatic — just a kind of true-life horror story about the helpful, soft-spoken monster in our midst.