Imagining Argentina

Wr & Dir: Christopher Hampton
Starring : Antonio Banderas, Emma Thompson
USA 2003, Cert: 15

Set in 1970’s Argentina when a military junta was in force, Christopher Hampton’s harsh, harrowing but one assumes fairly accurate film shows all too clearly the way a population can suffer at the hands of a military dictatorship when Marshal Law is in place. As in Costa Gavras’s fine film Missing we see how easy it is for those who wish to engage in peaceful protests, can just disappear, and behind the scenes in ever-bulging makeshift prisons are scenes of torture, rape and abuse going on.

It in this world that we come across the lives of a theatre director Carlos Rueda whose wife Cecilia (Thompson) gets snatched by the Police forces for alleged minor crimes. Carlos campaigns tirelessly to try and discover where his wife is but in effect she has ‘disappeared’ and it is left to Carlos’s daughter to try and comfort her father at such a difficult time. As in Missing, much of the rest of the film is taken up with Carlos’s search for his wife and the harrowing encounters she goes through and the fact that Carlos can through a sixth sense see what has happened to others who have been taken, but cannot see what has happened to his wife.

Imagining Argentina has all the right sentiments and whilst you cannot fault the drive of the film to expose awful dictatorship injustice, the script lacks significant inspiration and ultimately authenticity is damaged by the fact that the film is spoken entirely in English without resort to subtitles, even though it is set in Argentina. It gives it a TV-movie-ish feel which is unfortunate and detracts from what is on view. At the end, startling facts are displayed over the final credits about how many suffered at the hands of the military. They were soon to be engaged in the Falklands War, leaving you feeling comfortable that they were engaged in that, following their dreadful actions shown here.

Matt Arnoldi