Imagining Argentina

Imagining Argentina could only be imagined by a perversely ignorant mind. Since its director/screenwriter is Christopher Hampton, who before and after has adapted the screenplays of Dangerous Liaisons, Mary Reilly, The Quiet American, and The Father, I can only blame Lawrence Thornton, whose novel inspired (though perhaps a better word would be instigated) this vile piece of crap. The film takes place in 1977, in an Argentina where everyone speaks English with a wide range of Hispanic and Latin American accents, none of which sound remotely Argentinian. The exception is Emma Thompson, who uses her natural British accent even though her character's name is Cecilia Rueda. She is a dissident journalist in Buenos Aires; after publishing an article denouncing the forced disappearance of students protesting bus fares, Cecilia is kidnapped by the secret police. Faced with the indifference, and almost certain complicity, of the authorities, her husband Carlos (Antonio Banderas) puts up posters with Cecilia's photo, but I doubt that these are of any use, considering that the information on them is printed in Spanish and here everyone, as I just noted, speaks English. This linguistic dissonance, however, is not the most outrageous aspect the movie. Oh no; that dubious honor is reserved for the fact, and I swear I'm not making this up, that Carlos happens to be psychic. Really. Carlos is producing a play for a youth theater troupe, and one fine day, completely out of the blue, he tells one of the actors that his father, who was also kidnapped, will be released later that night. “It was as if I was remembering the future,” he explains to his friend and colleague Silvio (Rubén Blades, who that same year appeared in Once Upon a Time in Mexico; who would have imagined that the latter would be the more realistic of the two). The whole thing is like a cross between Tell Me How I Die and the Saturday Night Live episode where Chris Walken is a "trivial psychic," except that there’s nothing trivial about state terrorism in Argentina in the 1970s and 1980s. Carlos's prediction comes true, which could very well have been a coincidence; however, he never questions his new powers and soon summons the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo to reveal the fate of their loved ones. All of this is extremely insensitive, offensive, and disrespectful. Not only does it minimize an enormous tragedy, but on top of that, whether deliberately or not, effectively calls it into question. Let's say that Johnny Moviegoer does not know the full extent of the atrocities committed during the last dictatorship in Argentina, but he is fully aware that in real life no one can "remember the future"; now, if the movie indiscriminately exaggerates the latter, who could blame Johnny for assuming that the former is likewise pure hyperbole? As it is, the graphic scenes of rape and torture presented in the film are gratuitous because they do not take place in a medium that bears any resemblance to the real world. Films like Night of the Pencils and The Official Story are vastly superior not only because they were written in Spanish and directed and acted by Argentines, but above all because they take their material very seriously. Imagining Argentina is, and this is the lesser of its evils, unnecessary, but since they felt compelled to do it, why not change Carlos from a real psychic to a charlatan who slowly changes his attitude as he becomes more familiar with the stories of the people he’s scamming? That way it wouldn’t be the filmmakers the ones who end up coming across as swindlers.