The official story

The Official Story

THE HISTORICAL and human elements are cannily blended in The Official Story, an Argentine film in which national calamity and individual tragedy answer each other like strophe and antistrophe. It is rare for a film to do equal justice to public and private problems, with subject and theme in such harrowingly close harmoney. Furthermore, technique--a preponderance of short, nervously edited scenes with many tight closeups (the director got his training in TV commercials)--is in flawless balance with content. For the slow dawning of realization must be shown in minutely scrutinized countenances; the frantic pursuit of an elusive truth, with jagged scenes hurtling from place to place.

It is 1983, after the Falkland disaster; an edgy dictatorship wages a secret, dirty war against so-called subversives. Argentina is suddenly full--or emptied--of desaparecidos, missing people who were tortured and killed in camps where the butchers often sold or adopted children abducted with their parents or born there. Unless, of course, the children, too, were killed. The story concerns Alicia, a middleaged history teacher in an upper-bourgeois prep school, married to Roberto, a high-level executive in a U.S.-dominated multinational corporation. Childless, the couple has adopted Gabi, now five, from what Roberto vaguely described as a mother at some hospital who did not want her. Both adoptive parents lavish affection on the dazzling little girl, though they're not particularly emotional otherwise: Roberto is a slippery-smooth, cool businessman; Alicia a strict teacher preconizing hard grading and stringent discipline.

But when the beautiful Ana, back from long exile, meets her old friend Alicia again, she has a horrific tale of torture and rape to impart, along with the revelation that many recently adopted children belonged to murdered mothers. Here begins Alicia's awakening. She is a decent, intelligent person --one of those who are even more important to a dictatorship than active collaborators: the ones who see only what suits them. Most effectively, the scenarists--the writer Aida Bortnick and the director Luis Puenzo--have chosen for their protagonist a history teacher and "mother'--showing how one who should know best and feel most can be rendered ignorant and apathetic by convenience. In class, when a student presents a seamy view of Argentine history that clashes with the official version, the incredulous Alicia asks for documents, for books supporting the pupil's report. Comes the cocky but credible answer: "History is written by the assassins.'

Questioning her husband anew about Gabi, Alicia gets replies that are even shorter, shadowier, more snappish than before. At the same time, through glimpses of various students, teachers, business and political figures, and publicly protesting grandmothers, our boding unease is made to grow in unison with hers. There is, for example, a dinner party where all the men are in formal black, and only a young American, son of a partner in Roberto's firm, is wearing white. Nothing is made of this explicitly, yet the alien and alienating presence prefigures Roberto's involvement in foreign speculation. Also at the party is a particularly crusty ramrod of a general, which hints at Roberto's connection with the paramilitary forces. This scene is parallelled by a women's lunch at which Ana, who was jailed and abused for a long-since-concluded affair with a suspected and wanted revolutionary, rounds on a woman friend who, after not coming to her aid, presented the escaping, expropriated Ana with a set of silver salt and pepper shakers.

With many such fine, small, piercing touches, the film traces Alicia's awakening. When Alicia asks Ana why she didn't denounce her torturers and Ana replies with the question, "To whom could I have denounced them?,' the chill is intensified by the setting: Alicia's comfortable living room, full of the gratuities of affluence punctiliously recorded by the camera. And as we observe the adorable but already spoiled little Gabi, we wonder how much of this parental overindulgence is expiation of repressed guilt. Alicia decides to investigate, and it is one of the film's multiple achievements to chronicle faithfully the tiny, worsening incidents that jolt the woman out of mendacious acquiescence into brave, eventually self-destructive but also redeeming, action. For although The Official Story wisely leaves some searing questions open, there is no doubt about the penultimate shot, in which Alicia, not unlike Ibsen's Nora, leaves the keys on the inside as she departs. Her husband has just brutalized her for the first time; worse, he has been revealed as a liar and a fascist. A public tragedy has been brought home to a private, badly burnt heart.

Yet a film subtle enough to tell so much through keys left in a lock on the inside is in no danger of portraying Roberto as a simplistic villain. (The nearest thing to that is Alicia's confessor, a priest emblematic of the complicity of the Argentine church, who keeps pushing Alicia back into blindness.) Roberto is the son of an impoverished radical family whom he perceives as losers, a family that showers him with contumely while accepting his financial support. An otherwise devoted son and brother, Roberto simply wants to be on the winning team --a human enough flaw. The family conflict erupts in yet another brilliantly orchestrated eating scene--creature comforts in ironic contrast to the soul's discomfiture--as an uncomprehending Gabi and anguished Alicia look on. In such ways is our heroine's education frighteningly furthered.