Parque Lezama, a placid bucolic park in central Buenos Aires. An aged man, Cardozo (Eduardo Blanco), sits on a bench just down from the park’s gazebo, pretending to read a newspaper, though his hands are shaking and he has lost his peripheral vision. Not much younger, Leon (Luis Brandoni), a former communist activist with a beret and walking stick, shuffles towards him and sits at his side.
“Well, what we were talking about?” he asks. “We’re weren’t talking. I don’t even know your name,” retorts Cardozo. “
“In my work, you have to assume a secret identity,” says León claiming his is Mobutu, a former officer of the Army for the Liberation of Rwanda.
Further on in Argentine Netflix film “Strangers in the Park,” the latest film from Oscar winner Juan José Campanella (“The Secret in Their Eyes”), Leon claims he’s a hot-shot lawyer – Ivan Rifkin of the law firm Weissman, Rifkin and Rocatagliatta – or a mafioso cop, Commissioner Severino “Hoarse Throat” Donato, to stop Cardozo, 85, being thrown out of his job as a janitor after 52 years service with just two months’ severance, or to get money back from a drug dealer who’s taken it from a girl in the park.
Produced for Netflix by Campanella’s Buenos Aires label 100 Bares, “Strangers in the Park” adapts Herb Gardner’s multiple Tony Award winning Broadway stage play “I’m Not Rappaport.” The film also fits into Netflix’s ongoing mission of adapting monuments of Latin American culture in that Campanella’s own Argentine stage version, “Parque Lezama,” ran for 11 years and 1,300 performances in Argentina.
In the film, despite Leon’s fantasising imagination, the two are soon exchanging confessions. “I dreams in colors, can see everything. When I wake up, reality appears a dream,” says Cardozo.
“People get old but ideas are young and beautiful,” exudes Leon. “The fight is unstoppable, like the turning of the stars. The exploiters, the land barons, the capitalist pigs, I eat them for lunch.”
Truth to say, Leon’s outraged protests land both of them in hot water and hospital. Does the battle for better world change anything?
“Your revolution is over. It’s old. It’s over. Have you seen the people, the beloved masses, lately? They don’t give a rat’s ass,” says Leon’s exasperated and now upper middle-class daughter, whom Leon accuses of “trading Marx and Lenin for Dolce and Gabbana.”
Yet León’s superannuated one man revolution does change the world – or at least a little part if it – by changing Cardozo.
Variety talked to Campanella whose “Strangers in the Park,” launched first in theatres on Feb. 19 and then on Netflix, where it bowed on March 6, hitting no. 7 on its global non-English film chart over March 2-8.
Strangers in the Park. Juan José Campanella / Netflix © 2026.
Marcos Ludevid / Netflix
The film turns on two old men but it’s not about age…
Juan José Campanella: Exactly, it adapts the American play “I’m Not Rappaport.” I saw it in 1985 on Broadway when I was a NYU film student. I was immediately struck by it to the point that it became a big influence on the tone that I’ve tried to give my stories after that. It’s exactly what you’re saying: Old age is not the theme of the movie. The theme is precisely how we choose to live our lives, “compromiso versus el mismo,” commitment versus looking after No. 1. Old age just raises the stakes. You can’t be as active but you can still choose how to live your life.
León lives out his commitment via his imagination….
Yes, imagination is a way of committing to something, even if it’s in the smallest of actions. We have a character, León, whose main goal in life was to change the world, and all he manages to do is to change the other guy, Cardozo. But in doing so, he does change the world in some degree. I thought that that was the most fascinating thing about the play, that that was the subject matter. So old age is a circumstance, as if we’re setting the film in WWII or in outer space.
Do you think or hope that your own films make a difference?
There was a line in my first Argentine movie where one of the female characters says that she’d love to do something that changes people’s lives, at least a little bit. A friend, a writer, told me that once. And it struck me, like many movies have impacted me. “It’s a Wonderful Life” or Italy’s “We All Love Each Other So Much” or “All That Jazz.” Those are movies that sent me in a different direction in life. You’d hope that what you does would have that same effect.
Nobody would say your movies are agitprop….
I’m very weary of agitprop. I leave that to Twitter, which I’m retired from too. But the bigger thing is your moral stance, how you look at life. And in fiction, we work with emotion. The specialty of fiction is to get to the mind through the heart, rather than getting to the heart through the mind, like an essay or a documentary can do. “Strangers in the Park” talks about ideas. But we’re working more with emotions and that has a deeper impact. I’ve been trying to achieve effect of “It’s a Wonderful Life.” I don’t know if I succeeded in any of the movies, but that was the goal.
Is that why you also do TV, because of the potentially larger audience of TV?
Not really. I like them as different media. I’m not a good writer of prose. But I can write a scene and dialog and direct actors to tell those things. That’s why I do television, movies and theater. Television is a little bit different. You get a bigger emotional impact in theater and in film though television can be emotional. But the bigger screen, or the effect of live actors in theater, and the fact that you’re sitting looking up at something – it just puts you in a completely different mood than when you’re on the sofa with the TV remote control: You’re too comfortable watching television.
You’ve also tended to write your movies but not your U.S. TV shows….
In television, I look for great stories that try to grab you but I also like to work with somebody else’s material. I’m very open with that because it keeps me flexible. It means I’m not repeating myself. Working with other people’s material, I flex muscles that I wouldn’t have flexed, and it informs my writing. My movies have changed stylistically from one to another thanks to the television that I do in between. “Strangers in the Park” just wouldn’t have been possible without “Law and Order,” to give a very concrete example.
Do you think that that the power of theater was one reason why Francisco Ramos [Netflix VP of Latin American Content] was interested in watching your stage adaptation of the Herb Gardner original?
Yes, I was very lucky with that. Franciscowasin Buenos Aires when we were about to close the play. I don’t know how to pitch a project, do a good deck. So I asked Paco, ‘Please go to see the play. I think there’s much to say for a film version, not just as a record of the play. But you have to understand what it is. And he went and he said it was great. I really love him because he’s very expeditious, very fast in his decisions. He called me from the sidewalk of the theater at the end of the play and left a message saying, “Let’s do the movie.”
Netflix has global rights. That’s one way a director in one country can appeal to the whole of the world. Another is genre, in the broadest sense, and another the commonality of sentiments. “The Secret in Their Eyes” combines both – a double murder mystery almost which talks about the power of love. You’ve worked in the North American industry where genre is particularly popular…..
It’s a matter of degree. It’s not that characters are unimportant in the U.S. Some of the most wonderful characters in the history of film have been created in American movies. Most of them. But it’s true that plot is very important for American movies. It’s very important in what I try to do, which is a genre mix. There are no new ingredients, just new ways of mixing them. It’s like cooking. There’s no new ingredient in the last 500 years or more. But they make foams and mousses. But in the end, it’s onions anyway.
Which you see in “The Secret in Their Eyes”….
I’ve always thought of it as an American movie with Italian characters. Not the stoic film noir detective but a guy who wouldn’t be able to sleep at night when he sees the the corpse of a woman brutalized and who obsesses about those human reactions. In real life, these are hardened characters who have seen many corpses and many things. But we play them as if they were seeing a corpse for the first time, like regular people. I think that gave a more immediate impact for an audience and for the story.
You’re talking again about emotions….
Usually the plot is the motor that takes you from A to B to C, the reaction to something happening outside and creators tag the emotions on to that. What I’m trying to do is the other way around. What lets me go from A to B to C are guilt, revenge, fear, love, whatever, and I tag the plot onto that. Both things are necessary in any case, but it’s a matter of degree.
Can you give an example?
I ask: ‘What is the emotional objective of this character rather than what is a plot objective of the character. The greatest movies are like that. “Casablanca” is not about how they’re going to escape but rather what side Rick’s going to be on. Is he going to go for the girl or for the higher cost? It takes a genre, does have a plot, but the movie’s great because of the moral dilemma. What moves the characters throughout a movie? That’s what I like to work on. And movies are great for that.
Adapting “I’m Not Rappaport” for cinema also allowed you to explore other keys to cinema’s greatness….
Yes, in theater, you’re watching the story continuously in an establishing shot, like a movie shot in an establishing shot. You lack the closeness, which is very powerful when you have actors of this caliber. And in theater, 99.9% of the time, unless the director does a trick with lighting or whatever, your eyes go to the person speaking. In film, I can show the person who’s listening. In this play it’s so important, it almost tells a different story. The close up and the ability to show who’s listening is a huge change with the play, making for a much more emotional journey.
You can also be more nuanced where characters communicate by how they look, not what they say….
Very much so. Very much so. The character of León, the left wing Jew, is very vocal about his ideals, but not so vocal about what he thinks of the other man. But you can see that in his eyes, which “The Secret in Their Eyes” was about. The script was telling one story and the eyes a different story. In the film, we have so many great looks, that speak volumes.
Michael Caine once said that film acting was like working with a laser…..
Exactly. The volume is lower and the communication closer. When you see both of them looking at each other, you can see in Cardozo, his growing admiration and slow awakening. You know that from the way he looks although he never admits it – when he speaks, he resists. The characters say one thing but they’re experiencing – it’s not even thinking – they’re experiencing something different.
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