Imagining Argentina

Imagining Argentina (2003)

The story, and the facts behind the story, of innocent people being kidnapped, tortured, and killed in Argentina is so disturbing and emotionally draining it's hard to see this movie objectively. I wish it was a better movie, both in its construction (the filming and editing) and in the storytelling decisions (too much emphasis on empty searching, and too much torture, even after we get the point).

Cruelty needs no sympathy, and this movie gives it none. But it gives it attention, offering only a solution in perseverance and romantic love. There are lots of evocative scenes of dancing and music, of wide open countryside, and of warmly lit interiors. It paints a picture of a beautiful country with a beautiful culture, just to show how a small tilt in a great place can turn to horrors.

The final statistics of all the people "disappeared" under the Argentine dictatorship is an indictment of cruel dictators. The movie serves to remind us, and to paint the horrors, and it goes half way. I wish it had been a poetic, or raw, or inventive success as well.

Please excuse my English, now that it is my third language. I was born and raised in Argentina; I currently work in Buenos Aires at a café, until I get my bachelor degree in naval architecture. As crazy as it might sound, my grandfather disappeared in the 1970s, and never came back. Perhaps to you… this was just a movie, you can rate it as you want or give the names you like to. But I found myself dumb founded with this film, I felt the worst anguish while seeing it, and forced myself to keep on watching and to keep on remembering. I can not find words in English nor Spanish to describe how deeply this movie has gotten to me. It's been a long time since it happened, but I see most of this film as my mind portraying old stories that my grandmother used to tell me when I asked about the dad of my dad. A film where reality is described at its best and where a part of me knows that justice in this country is just a word with no meaning, it was before, and it is now. I win nothing by saying this, nor I feel better, I just thought that perhaps I should comment on the impact the movie has had on someone like me, a normal guy who studies and works in country where future has little by little lost its meaning.

Imagining… arrived with a fair degree of controversy, having been booed, heckled and subject to walkouts at 2003's Venice Film Festival. By saddling an infamous chapter in Argentina's history with a supernatural slant – Sixth Sense meets Missing, perhaps – many critics thought this was altogether a bridge too far. But was the reaction justified? It rather depends on whether you prefer your politics served up in an allegorical sauce or red and dripping on the bone. An adaptation of Lawrence Thornton's award-winning novel, the story begins in 1970s Buenos Aires, with dissident journalist Cecilia Rueda (a waveringly-accented Thompson) kidnapped by the fascist junta to join the ranks of the 30,000 'Disappeared'. As her bereft theatre-owner husband Carlos (Banderas) searches in vain, he develops psychic powers, enabling him to witness what happened to his wife and her fellow detainees. Laying his hands on their relatives he glimpses horrifying images of torture, rape and death at the military's hands, galvanising a traumatised public into motioning the government. In Thornton's magic-realist hands, Carlos's clairvoyance was a metaphor for the struggle against state repression, as he 'imagines' scenarios running counter to the official line: 'if you live in a nightmare, you have to re-imagine it.' While playwright-turned-director Christopher Hampton (who also wrote the screenplay for The Quiet American) cannot hope to replicate the novel's tender touch – the voyage from page to screen being a tricky one at best – the intentions are heartfelt, and the film does make salient points about the importance of empathy and memory as powerful and long-reaching political instruments in themselves.

I am pretty sure that it is not possible for someone other than an Argentine to make a film about this subject and have it matter. These are people who at the beginning of the terror supported it wholeheartedly. The military simply responded to what they saw was a terrorist threat by arresting without process and torturing. Starting small means starting; once you cross the line, everything else is trivial. And so 6 years of what ramped up to 3o police murders a day in Buenos Aires.

So this thing lacks power as a story about Argentine horror. But even through all its faults, it still rings true and haunts about things at home: power corrupted and evil. Torture to protect citizens never does.

The film is incredibly muffed, in pretty much all dimensions except...

There are two good scenes. One is when the husband of the newly missing wife is comforted by his daughter in a somewhat sexual way. This was made for American consumption, and though the interaction may be genuinely Latin, the implication in this context is plain. It was a powerful scene and sets up all that follows.

The second powerful scene is the unveiling of a spy. There is only a second that matters, when the man knows he is revealed and you see not panic but blame to his informant. It happens fact but it matters.

Otherwise, what we have is a powerfully conceived set of folding narratives: a man as a playwright (precisely as in "The Lives of Others") in a film with deliberate dissonance. And him further as a psychic, telling the story to us and other characters as it happens to him. In other hands, this could have worked, especially with the intended fold from then there to now here.

Tangos, l'exil de Gardel, was not good, but still better and at least genuine.

Ted's Evaluation -- 1 of 3: You can find something better to do with this part of your life.

The first thing I'd like to say is I've been reading people's comments about this movie, and I'm really touched at how much people round the world know about the worst period in Argentinian history. As regards the movie itself, I wouldn't like to disrespect anyone, but I think it is a lousy portrayal of real events. I agree with someone that the title allows for the viewer to expect a free interpretation rather than an accurate historical account. I disagree with someone about the images of torture being too many and too cruel. I think they were too soft. I've seen at least twenty Argentinian movies dealing with this topic (actually, I'd say nine out of ten Argentinian movies have at least one referent to it). The point is, no one can make a movie about "El Proceso" but an Argentinian citizen. It's nothing to be proud of, but it's our burden. I didn't have anyone missing, but I grew up with this, and it'll never be over for us. I understand the good intentions of everyone involved in this movie, and I think it's important that people in other countries let the world find out what happened here, but if you really want to know, you should see local accounts, without fake accents (subtitles are not that bad once you get used to them). Oh, and just for the record, the oppressors were ten times more somber and disgusting than what the movie shows. Most of them still feel the same way about everything they did, and as someone said, justice in this country is a lost cause. I just pray it never happens again. Thanks for reading.