Onetti. Juan Carlos Onetti.

Gilles Taurand

“Une Nuit de Chien “(Tonight) is justifiably regarded as one of Uruguayan writer Juan Carlos Onetti's best novels. The story takes place over one night. A nightmare that anticipates some of the most tragic episodes of Latin America's recent history. In a besieged town, everyone is desperately trying to save their own skins.

Onetti's talent is in getting us to believe early on that the town is surrounded by an invisible enemy and that there is still a chance for escape. A liner is docked and supposed to raise anchor at the break of dawn. Up to the moment where the reader realizes that the town is also besieged from within. From then on, the enemy is everywhere. Each character becomes a potential killer. There are no more allies, only temporary alliances just as likely to inverse themselves at any moment. When a person extends a helping hand and may at the same time betray you without any apparent reason, paranoia rules. “Une nuit de chien” (Tonight) is a story of an unusually dark quality about paranoia, written in a style that reminds one of Kafka. It brings to mind works such as The Trial, The Castle etc, of novels that consistently reinvent a terrifying logic of absurdity.

The reader of the screenplay might wonder where this town is located and when it takes place. In Onetti's novel, Santa Maria is an imaginary town, a pure invention which is anything but a coincidence. The prevailing factor, which makes us understand that beyond its twilight atmosphere the story has a universal meaning, it is the human aspect of the characters, which implacably makes one think of a Greek tragedy. Ossorio Vignale is the main hero. In his novel, Onetti does not give us any clues as to why this man finds himself prisoner in a town from which he is desperately trying to escape.

So one of my earliest decisions was to invent a past for him. I made him a surgeon who one day decided to get involved in politics, a militant member in a party we can easily imagine opposed to the militia now trying to take their revenge. Ossorio fought against General Fraga's troups in the Mountains to the north. He became "Colonel Luis", a kind of mythical hero. But the man who comes back to Santa Maria is weakened. Fraga's troups are besieging a town crowded with refugees. The final attack is imminent.

Why does he come back? To die a beautiful death? Onetti does not give us any clues. Hence, I imagined a female character that does not exist in the novel. I called her Clara Baldi. She is a politically committed journalist and was Ossorio's mistress. From the very beginning of the story, we understand that she had called him for help. She has an "escape plan" and wants to flee together with him on the Bouver which is going to raise anchor at dawn.

Orpheus has come to free his Eurydice from hell. But Eurydice has disappeared. Was Clara Baldi kidnapped? Or is she playing with Ossorio's feelings in order to put his love to the test? Unless she has chosen to find refuge in the arms of another?

The vanishing lady is not new to cinema. Antonioni made a chef d'oeuvre on the subject. The missing piece of a puzzle simply allows us to see ourselves in a mirror. In fact it is one of the challenges of this project to lead the main character through sustained action exactly as a thriller would do. All the while dropping fragments of information from the past, from Ossorio's, Clara's, Morasan's, Barcala's and others, without ever attributing any psychological value within these fragments. Only a single night to seek an elusive truth.

Apart from the female character, we find the majority of characters and sets as they are presented in Onetti's novel. Resigned to their fate and unable to help change the course of events, the women Ossorio meets are to my mind all magnificent. As for the men who fear above all the idea of powerlessness, all that remains is to find refuge in the mad rush for power which will inexorably lead to carnage.

Certain encounters are more important than others. Onetti's novel, Werner Schroeter's confidential universe and Paulo Branco's combatant will were all factors which led me without hesitation to launch into this adaptation.