Torture Test

By Richard Schickel

It is a normal evening; two old school chums are getting together after seven years, catching up on each other's news. Alicia (Norma Aleandro) is particularly eager for Ana (Chunchuna Villafane) to meet Gaby, the five-year-old girl she and her husband adopted when she was an infant. Late that night the two women sit gossiping and getting tiddly on eggnogs when, without at first modulating her tone, Ana explains why she left Argentina so suddenly, without saying goodbye to anyone. It is a tale of midnight abduction, a blow to her head--and waking up naked, tied to a table prepared for torture. Her ordeal continued for 36 days and ultimately included rape. The world she has traveled since is not large enough to escape the memory of those agonies. And there will never be time enough to forget them.

The scene is a great one, awesomely played by the two actresses. The way terror can suddenly appear in the midst of banality, the basic irony that is the source of most modern horror fiction whether it be crude slasher pic or elegant Hitchcock classic, has never been more eloquently or economically stated. For Ana, at least, there is relief in hysterically speaking at last of what has been, for her, the unspeakable. For Alicia, however, the friend's nightmare only hints at the one that she herself is to face. Under the terror imposed by the junta, which ruled Argentina until 1983, Ana has observed, many of the babies born in prison were put up for adoption. It is possible that Alicia's Gaby may be a child of desaparecidos, the "missing ones" (there were more than 9,000 of them) who simply vanished without a trace during the state's infamous "dirty war" on alleged subversives.

Alicia, who does not inquire too deeply into how her husband Roberto (the excellent Hector Alterio) happens to be doing so well in business, finds herself compelled to look more carefully into her child's background. Frustration with the utter lack of documentation--obviously it was in the state's interest not to keep records--leads to obsession. And obsession leads to a belated political awakening, including a recognition that she would not have this child were Roberto not so involved with an evil regime. It also brings her, at last, into contact with a woman who is probably Gaby's grandmother and her only living relative.

How these good women resolve their anguish The Official Story wisely does not state. There is no Solomonic wisdom applicable to this situation. In any event, the film's business is not to unwind a plot but to frame a parable about the individual's relationship to totalitarianism. And that is subtly written on the lovely face of Aleandro as she descends from serenity and self-possession to a final, harrowing acknowledgment that her privileged life was based on willed blindness, that her future is as an emotional desaparecido. Hers is a performance that one knows will not be forgotten, much as one would like to try to erase it, and all that it stands for, from memory. --By Richard Schickel