Books, Arts & Manners: Love’s Fools

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 harmony. 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 middle aged 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.

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John Simon

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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 harmony. 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 middle aged 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.