Cannes: Husband-wife team from Argentina serves up nail-biter about emergency room doctor

Argentine thriller about ambulance doc at Cannes

CANNES, France — An emergency room doctor was anything but a dream role for needle-phobic Argentine actress Martina Gusman.

Before filming “Carancho” — the new film by her husband, director Pablo Trapero — Gusman spent six long months working through her needle issues by doing a sort of internship at a hospital in Buenos Aires.

“When I read the script and saw that I was going to have to give shots, I told Pablo, ‘no, I can’t do this. If I see a needle, I feel like I’m going to pass out,’” the 31-year-old actress said in an interview with The Associated Press at the Cannes Film Festival, where the movie screened. “Needles panic me, just panic me!”

Gusman saw more than her share of them during her hospital observations, where she tagged along with the head of the emergency room for his 24-hour-long shifts.

“Obviously, I had to wear scrubs because you can’t wear civilian clothes in a hospital, and obviously if you’re there, you start to pitch in and lend a hand. You start seeing how things work and feeling that adrenaline,” she said. “My goal was to arrive on the set and really feel I had mastered all medical techniques” — including giving shots.

“Carancho,” which played out of competition at Cannes, is rife with needles. As part of an ambulance team, Gusman’s character, Lujan, is often the first on the scene of terrible traffic accidents, where she has to perform CPR, stanch blood-drenched wounds and even, gasp, give injections. And as if that weren’t enough needles, the young doctor shoots herself up with sedatives to calm her frayed nerves.

It’s on the scene of a car crash that Lujan meets Sosa, a disbarred lawyer-turned-ambulance chaser played by celebrated Argentine actor Ricardo Darin, who starred in the Oscar winning “The Secret in Their Eyes.”

Lujan and Sosa are lonely souls in desperate situations and they soon find comfort in each other’s arms — with disastrous consequences.

With “Carancho,” Trapero manages the same delicate balance between drama and action as in his last film, 2008’s “Lion’s Den” — which starred Gusman as a woman who gives birth in prison while serving a murder sentence.

Gusman said she and Trapero, who have been married 10 years and have an 8-year-old son, will be busy promoting “Carancho” through the end of the year but are already thinking about their next project.

Still, Gusman said she is still recovering from the draining experience that was preparing and shooting “Carancho.”

The hospital internship “really shocked me. Obviously, I saw a lot of really intense things that made me rethink my ideas about life and death. I realized that everything can change in just a second.”

Online:

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